By Payal Uttam

The California-born artist Matt Mullican has been hard at work in Liechtenstein, producing ‘THAT NOTHING SHOULD EXIST: 55 Years of Work’, the largest exhibition of his career. It will inaugurate a new museum designed by the Italian architect Benedetto Camerana. Yet when asked where the museum is located, Mullican pauses. ‘The scale is massive – it has hundreds and hundreds of works,’ he says. ‘But in this instance, nothing does exist.’ Housed in a virtual museum called Roarington Art Center, the exhibition is taking place in the metaverse.

Scheduled to open to the public in February next year, the art center is embedded in the lush landscape of the City of Roarington, a virtual dreamland. The Liechtenstein-based entrepreneur and investor Fritz Kaiser launched the non-profit The Classic Car Trust (TCCT) in 2013 to preserve automotive heritage through digital innovation and is now bringing this vision to life with the creation of Roarington.

Roarington is an emerging virtual world where leading names in automotive culture — from Pininfarina, Zagato, and MAUTO, the National Italian Car Museum to Mercedes-Benz and the legendary 1000 Miglia — will present their masterpieces in digital form. Within this immersive realm, car enthusiasts will be able to drive and race replicas of their iconic vehicles in simulators and showcase them in virtual exhibitions.

The idea for the art center arose in a conversation Kaiser had with his friend, the Swiss publisher and collector Michael Ringier, who now leads the institution. The pair quickly realized that both car enthusiasts and art collectors share a love of design, innovation, and preserving cultural heritage. ‘So it was quite natural to combine the worlds,’ Ringier says. 

Kaiser adds, ‘In any meaningful city – digital or real – there must be a place for art, reflection, and shared imagination […] We have created something new here – a museum that’s not a replica of the physical, but a reimagining of how art can be shown and experienced in the 21st century.’

This initiative comes at a time when the art world continues to experiment with digital formats. While galleries have explored online viewing rooms and NFT showrooms and startups are playing with augmented reality, there are few fully realized contemporary art museums in the metaverse. Other industries, such as fashion, design, and architecture, have been quicker than the art world to embrace virtual technologies.

When Ringier first shared the idea of Roarington Art Center with curators and gallerists, he was met with raised eyebrows. He says he is unfazed because he had a similar experience when introducing digital journalism two decades ago: ‘Journalists were extremely skeptical but now we don’t even discuss it.’ He believes it will be a similar case with the art center.

‘Of course, this museum will never be able to replace anything. It’s adding something,’ he says, explaining that a virtual institution gives audiences immediate access to exhibitions across the globe and allows for a new means of archiving exhibitions. The absence of shipping costs and spatial constraints also offers more possibilities. 

It was fitting to inaugurate the museum with Mullican, a pioneering figure who began exploring ideas of the metaverse decades ago. ‘It’s something I was trying to define in the early ’70s – what it felt like to enter a space like this,’ the artist says. Throughout his career, Mullican has explored visual systems, mapping knowledge and perception, and has long been fascinated by the ‘interface of things.’ For him, it was only natural to participate in this project. ‘The interface of this museum and where it exists asks so many questions about where we are and what we’re doing.’

Viewers will enter the art center and navigate the space almost like an immersive three-dimensional video game. Approaching the building, visitors first see a giant slab of metal. ‘It’s a mysterious architectural wall set in the landscape,’ Camerana says. ‘You are invited to walk through a cut in the wall, which piques your curiosity.’ Viewers then pass over a bridge suspended above a verdant sunken garden before entering the exhibition.

Creating a building in the metaverse was liberating for Camerana as he was free from technical constraints or concerns about cost. He likens his approach to the sublime buildings that the French architects Étienne-Louis Boullée and Claude-Nicolas Ledoux imagined, many of which were never realized. ‘It’s quite radical,’ he says, that Roarington Art Center could be from either of their times.

Inside, light floods in through large skylights. In a nod to Italian racing heritage the interior features red accents in staircases and curved doorways that echo the forms of cars. Camerana estimates the building spans approximately 6,000 square meters, though scale is fluid in the virtual world. ‘People can magically become a one hundredth of [their original size] when they enter a building and immediately become Lilliputian.’

Spread across eight rooms are paintings, rubbings, light boxes, videos, works on paper, and installations. Each of the works has been rendered to appear three-dimensional. Paintings appear on stretcher bars that protrude from the walls, for instance, and reflections are captured in the glass on framed works. ‘There is a sense of spatial presence and emotional atmosphere,’ Kaiser says. ‘You don’t scroll through it – you enter, explore, and feel.’

Viewers of Mullican’s exhibition first encounter a granite floor sculpture that spans more than 9 meters and is covered with symbols. Nearby hangs Untitled (Two into One becomes Three) (2011), a monumental yellow canvas with oil stick rubbings, originally shown at the Centre Pompidou-Metz. Other highlights include a room filled with his groundbreaking work from the 1980s, including Untitled (Computer Project) (1989) – a series of light boxes featuring some of the earliest computer-generated images of a ‘metaland,’ shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Mullican describes the experience of entering the exhibition spaces as ‘stepping inside a giant trompe l’oeil,’ where the mind briefly mistakes digital illusion for reality. He was even fooled for a second into thinking that a series of gouaches that hang in Ringier’s office building had been relocated to Roarington. It took him a moment to remind himself that these gouaches were actually ghosts, or twins, of physical pieces that remain in place.

Currently, the art center plans to mount two shows annually. On the first floor, Ringier will invite curators to create exhibitions of works from his collection. He is also looking to expand on the idea of the art center. ‘My dream is to establish a whole art ecosystem online, not just one museum,’ the collector says. ‘We threw a stone into the water. Now we see what kind of waves it creates.’

In the near future, individual plots of land and buildings in Roarington will be put up for sale. Digital replicas of artworks and digital twins of cars will be available for sale, secured by a blockchain footprint. These will not only function within Roarington but act as stand-alone digital assets too. The art center will also be incorporating augmented and virtual reality as part of the viewing experience.

As we spend more time inhabiting digital worlds, projects like Roarington are only the tip of the iceberg. ‘The metaverse is everything and it’s nothing,’ Mullican reflects. ‘It’s such an important landscape, and at the same time it’s not in any one place. We are living in the image world now. We’ve basically gone into the mirror.’