Flexibility, Flâneurie, and Affinity in the Metaverse

Abstract Progress toward a revolutionary metaverse is currently underway, but it is being led by large tech companies, like Meta, who aim to build on their current platforms and extend their already exploitative internet products. These efforts dominate the conversation around what the metaverse can be and whether it can be conceived as a collection of viable as spaces designed for collaboration, agency, and empathy. Metaverse projects led by individual artists are small in scope but powerful as alternatives to mainstream efforts in their ability to effect change, making them important case studies for what is possible for the making of the metaverse. This article offers a working definition for the imagined metaverse and the current proto metaverse and shifts the focus away from mainstream tech products and toward individual artistic experiments to highlight the lesser-known experiments that are shaping the metaverse in meaningful ways. It discusses the metaverse as a form of escape and counters the idea that it is thus limited to a social space that defaults to phatic communication about important issues. By drawing on theories of play and critically examining metaverse-based artworks that have a social mission, this article aims to show that, precisely because they are like computer games, metaverse projects are separate from but integrated with reality and allow imagination and experimentation to come together. Worlds created in the metaverse can be inspiring and resourceful sites for political activist ideas and knowledge-based understandings of the real world. Finally, it identifies three key attributes of the proto metaverse that allow for purposeful interaction and the possibility of knowledge acquisition. Four projects based in the proto metaverse are closely analyzed and evaluated against these observations to demonstrate examples of artistic practice grounded in the use of a kind of virtual flânerie – a reimagining of the cyberflâneur whose self-guided traversal through unknown digital territories is encouraged by curiosity and purpose – to experience, learn about, and feel inspired by the work’s overarching social activist message.