Labyrinths is a Virtual Reality exhibition that features the works of twenty-four artists dispersed throughout a dungeon-like gallery maze. Classically, the labyrinth is a space where serendipity, danger, and opportunity lurk around every corner. Like the labyrinthian archetype of the minotaur, Virtual Reality enables hybrid forms of imagination and embodiment. Its opportunities can simultaneously engage the worst human impulses or rise to new heights of human aspiration. Archetypal narratives unfold in recursive rhythms, and the spiraling structure of the maze is site for both self-reflection and projection.

Labyrinths have long symbolized psychic and spiritual journeys. In this exhibition, the virtual space becomes a meta-cognitive site where poetic associations happen through strange encounters. The exhibition is built upon a mode of controller-less, embodied navigation, in which participants explore a Virtual Reality maze through localized stepping and leaning motions that drive navigation. The maze itself finds anatomical resonance in the architecture of the inner ear, which directly effects human sense of proprioception, balance, and spatial awareness. Throughout the maze, participants experience artworks that explore themes self and embodiment, representation and materiality, time and space.

Labyrinths features the works of artists Sara Abbaspour, Rebecca Aston, Bobby Berry, Justin Berry, Phillip Birch, Blinn & Lambert, Lance Chantiles-Wertz, Johannes DeYoung, John Eberhart, Jonathan Ehrenberg, Rebecca Gilbert, Jake Jefferies, Antonia Kuo, Adam Moftah, Nicholas O’Brien, Mike Rader, Ilana Savdie, Federico Solmi, Anahita Vossoughi, Jack Wesson, Natalie Westbrook, and Valentina Zamfirescu. The platform utilizes a mode of embodied navigation developed at Yale University’s Center for Collaborative Arts and Media, presented at the IEEE GEM 2018 conference in Galway, Ireland.