LORENALANDIA ON THE METAVERSE

I made a metaverse for Lorenalandia, it's a 3D space that you can experience and go into portals for different aspects of my life's story. It's made in spanish but it's more sensorial and exploratory than textual. \#

VISIT LORENALANDIA HERE

LORENALANDIA AND ITS MULTIDIMENSIONAL CONCEPT

STATE OF MIND

The concept of Lorenalandia started as a joke: when my friends asked me how I was doing in relation to what was happening in my country, I would tell them I was in Lorenalandia, and thanks to that, I kept my sanity. It's the place in my head where I exist with my interests and delusions, just them and me. There is no outside world; however, that world always ends up spilling into every space within that place. It contains hyperfixations and a diversity of interests; it contains artistic and mystical activities; it contains, truly, multitudes.

This state of mind is also one of isolation, where I avoid being in contact with the frustration of a reality I cannot change. It's where my focus is concentrated on everything I can do to change my world and, perhaps, a tiny bit of others' worlds through what I make. It's a space where I avoid overloading myself with information that doesn't interest me or isn't useful to me, or that simply hurts me and takes away my desire to keep making and existing. That world I don't want to establish contact with has shown me that it doesn't need me either. In the Lorenalandia of my head, only what engages me, interests me, entertains me, and keeps me wanting to live gets in. That doesn't make me blind to problems; I simply don't fixate my attention on anything where I can't actually make a change, even if it's minimal and symbolic.

STUDIO

Later, I named my studio the same way. It's a multifunctional studio in a room of my apartment. It used to be my dad's workshop; when he passed away, I inherited that workspace. There, I make music alone or accompanied, do my photoshoot sessions, my tarot readings, and the occasional craft outburst. There's also a fridge where beers sometimes appear.

This space, more than a room of one's own, is a bunker of one's own. It becomes more necessary as time goes by: it isolates me from repression, bombings, surveillance, abuse of authority, natural disasters, and it has a power bank where I can plug in my laptop during the many times the power goes out. In that world, which is sometimes painted with colorful lights, where there is music either through the monitors or from my own instruments playing live, I can escape an oppressive reality that wants to (and has managed, to some extent) keep me censored.

ONLINE

When I started researching the Indie Web movement, I decided to start a blog, yearning for the feeling of other times when the internet was more for reading than anything else, the pace was slower, and our interaction with it was more intentional. What other name could I give it but Lorenalandia? It was the extension of my head, of my studio as a place for creation and free thought, and now it could also exist on the internet. Not long after, I stumbled upon the Dark Forest OS project, which proposes, based on the Dark Forest theory of the internet, that most virtual activity between real humans on the web is now happening in closed groups, once public scrutiny and the overexposure of our lives exhausted us. I also created a space there, and named it the exact same way.

Thus, Lorenalandia exists in parallel as a state of mind, a place of refuge, and a virtual space.

The Latin American Technological Sensitization School#

My work in the workshop, although I didn't know it at first, was building Lorenalandia now in a three-dimensional space within digitality, as another face of this project that already exists in different forms in reality and on the screen. Learning about sound art in a deeper way, live coding, photogrammetry, metaverses, and AI, opened up possibilities previously unthinkable for me. I used to think 3D work was only for experts or that making music through programming was too complex, but being able to approach these tools with guidance from someone who knows them made me lose my fear of them and find a whole new world of creative possibilities that until then had been a great mystery.

All of this through the perspective of those of us who experience the internet from Latin America, which comes with its own set of implications, limitations, and unique perspectives. While in the United States they charge $1,200 USD for a vibe coding workshop, here we create with computers that could be considered obsolete technology, looking for alternatives or pirating software that fits into the new logics of subscriptions, where we no longer own software: we rent it. We also saw how our way of expressing ourselves, our languages (from ancient ones to the most recent born out of virtuality), our life experiences, and the landscapes that surround each of us in different parts of the continent create a unique way of questioning ourselves, paying homage, speaking out, or discovering details about our cultures and territories that were previously neglected or not widely known.

Making art—and even more so, technology-based art, is not the same from the Global North as it is from the Global South. Our problem-solving capacities carry over into our virtual lives too. Between VPNs, keygens, torrents, and open-source software, we find a way to resist by refusing to give up being part of global virtuality.

Lorenalandia and It's Process#

With the new knowledge I gained thanks to the School, bit by bit logic was telling me that I could keep working on the multidimensionality of Lorenalandia, now in another virtual layer, more interactive and navigable. When we were asked to make photogrammetries, the first thing I thought of was doing them with objects I had nearby, inside my house, since I find them curious, plus they've always been a central theme of my visual work. So I worked through the process with objects from the studio I was interested in bringing into 3D: the Funmachine, the Groovebox, the guitar, the cameras, the Furby, that small domestic installation I made with the globe on top of a typewriter (something I decided represents the internet for me: a keyboard that connects us to the world). They're all objects that not only carry great emotional meaning for me, but are also tools for creation or symbolic charms of my thought process.

After testing and iterating with what I produced through photogrammetry, in one of the AI classes we were taught tools to convert flat images into 3D objects. It seemed like the best alternative to me since I wasn't looking for high definition or realism in the objects, just for them to be replicas, maybe a bit cartoonish. That's how I assembled, from 2D through photos into 3D, the collection of all the objects I wanted to have in the space.

With that, I went into Blender to start building something; after struggling a bit with its interface and helping myself with a tutorial here and there, I was able to use it for what I needed. Lorenalandia, initially, was going to be just a room with replicas of my objects. I was exploring materials, elements imported from Sketchfab, and finally made a room I was relatively satisfied with.

When showing my progress in the project setup class, thanks to the feedback from Susana and my peers, we realized that for an inside to exist, an outside had to exist too. That represented another challenge, even an emotional one: accepting that despite my confinement, a world outside actually exists that I must acknowledge. I embarked on making a simplified version of Carrizal, the town where I live. Gathering mountain objects from Sketchfab and finally finding buildings similar to where I live by searching "soviet apartment building", I managed to make a simple version, but in a strange way, also faithful to the place surrounding me.

After that, my search began to bring these 3D models into a metaverse where they could exist in a navigable space. After several attempts on different platforms, I ended up deciding on New Art City. Placing everything I had on firm ground (or in this case, a sea) made me see the whole project differently. Taking advantage of New Art City's possibilities to create portals and play with object placement and scales, I decided to place the representation of Lorenalandia (the globe with the typewriter) as perhaps a ruin or geographical deformation on the mountain peak. The walkthrough wouldn't be realistic, you wouldn't enter the building into the room; it would be, rather, surreal and work through portals. Thus, Lorenalandia ended up divided into two spaces: the outside (Carrizal) and the inside (Lorenalandia).

TO THE METAVERSE AND BEYOND#

Having discarded the realistic option, in a specialized space within New Art City that allows extracting objects from it, I ended up finding a kind of futuristic capsule that acts as a stilt house (since it stands on its bases in the water). There I placed my objects, mostly musical instruments: the Groovebox RC202, the Funmachine, my pink guitar, and an instant camera. On top of this capsule, I embedded my current avatar, the profile image I use on all my networks modeled in 3D: it consists of my face peeking out from a floating island. This figure follows you with its gaze, like a Big Sister (whom I ended up naming Big Only Daughter, to be truer to reality). I also included some RGB lights, quite similar to the ones I use during the most special moments in real-life Lorenalandia, especially those when I make music. After finishing this room, I felt left wanting more, so I went to look for one more element in New Art City's space to find a third section, respecting the three-dimensionality that the concept of Lorenalandia has had from the beginning.

That was when I made "The Blackout" (curiously, I'm writing this in the middle of a blackout that left us without power since yesterday at 8 PM because a tree fell on the power pole supplying us energy, and apparently we won't have power until tonight, I'm completely cut off with no cellular data, how lovely). Blackouts and lack of electricity are our daily bread in Venezuela; in fact, in Carrizal, where I live, we're "lucky" to have power almost all the time (while in the interior of the country there are daily 7-hour blackouts). Still, it's common for us to be left without power for indefinite periods alongside constant voltage dips. But the blackout also reminded me of turning off the mind, the realm of dreams and the unconscious. There, I decided to place a piece I had shelved for a few years, produced in the radio art workshop 'RadioActivo' taught by Alejandro Silva. That work, Onirias, dealt with falling asleep watching TV and how the storylines of the shows or videos accompanying us into sleep get mixed up and distorted to the point where they star in our dreams. The piece is a series of three radio works: one about Aquí no hay quien viva, another about an Ophelia Pastrana video, and another about Seinfeld. I placed them in a dark, semi-flooded structure (curiously, also, in the days prior to writing this text, many places in Venezuela, including Carrizal, suffered terrible floods due to a tropical wave, which isn't exactly a radio station). These radio pieces trigger when passing near certain objects located in the different rooms of the structure. There, the portal to return to happy, colorful Lorenalandia is through a power bank, a replica of the one I have at home, which I use to get a bit more power when the lights go out. In the hallway of this space, I added two more elements: a table and a pen holder, which are also part of the objects I reunite with when screens have no power.

And so, Lorenalandia version 1.0 exists. It serves not only as an immersive audiovisual world you can navigate, but also opens portals to other spaces of my internet existence. Clicking each object redirects to a specific space: my navigable photo gallery, e-zines, and other net art experiments I've made, my website, my music, and all the scattered ways I move virtually. None of these objects lead to a social network, except YouTube (in the case of Onirias), because one of my goals right now is to demonstrate the endless possibilities of having an active online life without constantly consuming and posting on social media.

Lorenalandia is an autonomous space (as much as possible, as it relies on New Art City to exist) where interaction isn't measured or quantified; it's experienced rather than consumed. It's a way to transform the egocentrism Web 2.0 instilled in us into something equally egocentric but more creative and expansive. You don't scroll; you navigate. There's nothing to like, just clicking and jumping from link to link until reaching far corners of the internet we didn't know existed. It's one of many proofs that the internet is broader than the verticality imposed on it, that we can move along other axes too: sideways, into the deep, not just vertically, not just sinking downward into a bottomless pit draining our time. The internet is an open plain, broad, lush, full of possibilities and creating spaces like this is simply a demonstration of its potential.