A contemplative room inspired by vegetation and lush nature. The materiality of floor, walls, and ceiling deconstructs into a new type of matter only possible in virtual space.
OASIS (originally titled Metaverse Room) is a digital garden prototype that explores what happens when the conventions of architectural space dissolve into organic growth. The room begins as a simple rectangular volume (floor, walls, ceiling), but its surfaces are progressively consumed by hand-sculpted vegetation: grasses, flows, tendrils, and bulbous forms that erupt through the boundaries of the room and spill into the surrounding void.
The piece was shown at the Museum of Other Realities and later presented at Art Toronto 2019 by Galerie ELLEPHANT. By placing the majority of the sculpture’s detail on the ground plane, the work encourages visitors to crouch, sit, and inhabit the space at the level of the grass, a disarming posture that many visitors embraced, especially when being observed in a crowd.
Metaverse architecture reflects the possibilities afforded by the internet and 3D digital technology. In VR and AR, the materiality of the floor, walls, and ceiling can be deconstructed into a new type of matter, one that would have been impossible to experience as a lived space before the advent of these technologies.
The garden mixes thoughts of water, grasses, flowers, and flows. Each stroke of the VR controller adds another blade, another tendril, another gesture of growth. The accumulation produces a surface quality that is simultaneously digital and deeply organic. A landscape that reads as living despite being entirely hand-made.
By placing the majority of the detail on the ground, visitors experience the environment as if sitting in the grass. Disarming for many, especially when being observed in a crowd.
OASIS was first exhibited at the Museum of Other Realities, the social VR platform whose architecture Samuel was simultaneously designing. The piece later travelled to Art Toronto 2019, where it was presented by Galerie ELLEPHANT, one of the first times a hand-sculpted VR environment was shown at a major Canadian art fair.
The project represents a transitional moment in Samuel’s practice: the shift from designing architectural containers for art (the Museum of Other Realities, the VR Church) to creating the art itself. The sculptural language developed here, filling architecture with organic growth, would be refined across subsequent projects.
