Mundus Novus is a hallucinogenic 3D environment created from land-grabbing fantasies transferred from colonized places into virtual space. Past, present, and future visions of an infinite frontier merge as Mundus Novus collages the “new worlds” of past colonial expansions with the new metaverse territories of speculative real estate. Excerpts from the memoirs of European settlers who landed in the Americas—such as the Mayflower “pilgrims” who settled in Plymouth Colony in what is now Massachusetts—enrich the dreamscape, which is also inspired by the marketing strategies and role-playing games of Web 3.0 proponents who have revitalized settler extractive fantasies online. These strategies are based on the fiction of the metaverse as a technological inevitability—a new world to which we all ultimately and completely shift our lives. A cosmogenetic business strategy: one that designs the future as part of the cosmos constructed for sale.
Biography
BAHAR NOORIZADEH examines the relationship between art and capitalism. Her practice as an artist, writer and filmmaker explores the conflicted and contradictory notions of imagination and speculation that permeate each other. Her research engages with the histories of economics, cybernetic socialism and activist strategies against the financialization of life and living space, and asks what redistributive historical justice might look like in the present. Noorizadeh is the founder of Weird Economies, a socially networked co-authorship that pursues economic imaginaries that are exceptional to the financial arrangements of our time. She holds a PhD in Art from Goldsmiths, University of London, and is currently a lecturer at the RCA School of Architecture and the Design Academy Eindhoven.
RUDÀ BABAU is a filmmaker and artist based in Brasília and São Paulo, Brazil. They work with the virtuality of reality and the blurring between digital and material as code.
