Presented by Singapore Art Museum, Open Systems (OS) is a new initiative exploring the impacts of digital culture on creative expression. Focusing on creative code, software, and digital video, OS organizes online exhibitions that engage directly with their sites of production: the screen, the browser, and the platform. In addition to presenting artworks designed for the desktop, OS hosts and documents online interventions and virtual programmes that explore the impacts of networked culture on creative expression.

The debut project OS 1_Open Worlds presents alternative perspectives on the concept and significance of the “metaverse.” by analysing the relationship between real and virtual worlds. Exploring video games as sites of production and intervention, the exhibition brings together international artists and thinkers who imagine worlds and scenarios which challenge the logics of enclosure, privatization, and artificial scarcity imposed onto virtual realms. This process highlights the economic and social inequities of lived experience into digital space. Together, they suggest that game spaces may function as sites to rehearse novel modes of social, political, and spatial organistion.

Unfolding across six thematic chapters fortnightly, the artworks presented in OS1_Open Worlds seek to reframe virtual spaces as sites for practicing alternative modes of organisation within society, from the shared reality of global financial systems and major cities to the multiplicity of personal interactions and individual expression. As the boundaries between real and virtual spaces continue to degrade—another opening of worlds—interventions in virtual realities increasingly reflect upon our physical realities, for worse and for better. OS1_Open Worlds opens possibilities of reimagining our shared spaces, investigating a world that is no longer a niche pastime.

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