FlowerLab Warehouse

Flowerlab Warehouse as a virtual reality art installation published on VRChat combining stories, events, and Proto-Machine sculptures and continuing the fractal and virtual poetry of the AvantGarden. It is a meditative landscape that unfold as multidimensional poetry.

Asteroids, testing sites, forests, and open space are all entangled into one expanding ecosystem, intimate and colossal at the same time.

Flowerlab Warehouse is placed within is placed within VRChat, an amalgam of a computer game and a social platform that offers its users possibilities of organizing events and publishing content in the form of virtual worlds and avatars. VRChat could also be described as a “Non-game game”, a class of software offering the player unbound possibilities of freeform play, identity and a great degree of self-expression, exploration and interaction, without the limits of conventional or imposed goals and objectives.

Vilem Flusser, a key theoretician and philosopher of media, said that if we upgrade our apparatuses so we do not need to operate them continually, we could spend more time playing. For Flusser, play had the status of a supremely important human activity. Play can be understood as a series of acts of recreation, relaxation, creativity, being in the moment, structuring our free time and devoting ourselves to activities we enjoy. Through participation in the building of synthetic worlds and characters, games can be sought out as part of the process of "self-determination", part of Flusser’s idea of "humanization", which is, according to him, an overcoming of "thrownness" – the burdens of one’s birth impositions. Playful situations alternatively set up new temporary relations among participants and might include synthetic characters and worlds that have flourished together with the development of computer technologies. Video games offer temporary options of immersing oneself into alternative, modified or new lives with endless possibilities of modifications. We always played games: acts of pretending, of creating, building, influencing elements around ourselves, hunting or immersing ourselves into alternative landscapes. We learned how to get along with other people in small improvised spaces, in arenas, in both real life and virtual playgrounds.