ALTOGAME VIRTUAL GALLERY

Magicians of the North

Altogame Virtual Gallery
30 January – 29 April 2015

Artists: Sini Anttila-Rodriguez, Tyko Elo, Saija Kivikangas, Sami Korkiakoski, Salla Laurinolli, Mia Saharla, Matti Vainio, Ville-Veikko Viikilä
Curators: Henna Aho & Ville Laaksonen

Project description:

Magicians of the North was the inaugural exhibition of the Altogame Virtual Gallery, Finland’s first three-dimensional online gallery environment — a pioneering experiment in virtual exhibition design and networked experience. Long before the rise of the metaverse discourse, the project introduced a new spatial and social model for art presentation in 2015, merging curatorial practice with real-time interaction and digital architecture.

The exhibition featured eight Finnish contemporary artists whose practices explored gesture, color, and material transformation — translated here into a shared virtual space where art was not only viewed but experienced collectively. Visitors entered the gallery through a timed, invitation-only session — an “audience to a game” — where up to eight participants joined a guided tour. Each session unfolded as an interactive, anonymous encounter, allowing viewers to exchange thoughts and reactions in real time while navigating the 3D environment together.

This curatorial format redefined the act of exhibition-making as co-presence rather than observation. By positioning the visitor as an active node within a collective perceptual field, Magicians of the North anticipated later developments in SocialVR, metaverse exhibitions, and participatory digital art ecologies. The project asked what it means to experience art when the “white cube” dissolves into a virtual horizon — when space, dialogue, and emotion become equally programmable.

Altogame Virtual Gallery served as a prototype for future digital cultural infrastructures: a platform that treated art not as static content but as a socially negotiated event. It demonstrated how immersive technologies could expand curatorial authorship into facilitation — transforming viewers into participants and art into a shared, performative experience.

In retrospect, Magicians of the North stands as one of Finland’s earliest experiments in metaverse-based art presentation, marking a turning point in curatorial thinking toward networked, spatial, and experiential art environments.