Multi-sensory Immersive Experience

Art in Space, in Boulevard Crescent in Downtown Dubai, presents itself as a multisensory immersive gallery: its room combines video, sound, scents, light, fog, special effects and temperature, run from a central control system, so that artists can address all five senses. The gallery organised what was announced as the city's first digital art festival, a programme of more than a hundred digital artists that included BoulevArt, an exhibition of immersive, digital and new media art with web3 and NFT works, talks and panel discussions. Federico Clapis took part in BoulevArt as an exhibiting artist and was listed among the speakers, in a programme that also featured Krista Kim and Michael Benisty.

The video documentation shows Clapis' work inside the immersive room. The walls are wrapped in the image of a brick façade with rows of windows lit in red and pink neon, like the shop windows of Amsterdam's red-light district; a door carries a room number and an Amsterdam telephone code, and a sign reads "XXX". In the windows, in place of people, white robotic arms move and pose. Magenta light runs along the floor, and the scene appears to surround the viewer on every side.

The work brings together two recurring threads of Clapis' research, the body and the machine, and turns the commodification of intimacy into a question about automation. The setting of a gallery designed for synaesthetic experience allowed the piece to be shown as an environment to be entered rather than an image on a screen, in a city that was building its role in the digital art and NFT scene.

Sources

• A huge digital art festival is taking place at Downtown Dubai — What's On Dubai
• ART IN SPACE - Art Dubai — Art Dubai