Art Basel Unlimited

Basel

10.06 - 16.06.2024

Matt Mullican: Untitled (Computer Project), 1989

Matt Mullican is an artist who explores ideas of the metaverse and has experimented with early versions of computer generated virtual reality systems since the late 1980s. Mullican pioneered the creation of artificial city environments using a highly spe- cialized ‘supercomputer,’ designed by leading researchers at the time.

His visionary work Untitled (Computer Project), delves into these virtual worlds through 18 light- box transparencies and prints depicting computer-generated designs for an imagined city laid out in five color-coded districts corresponding to Mullican’s cosmological schema. By harnessing emerging virtual reality technologies in the late 20th century, Mullican presciently anticipated the collapse of boundaries between the real and the virtual that has come to define the contemporary mindset.