While Silicon Valley spent a decade selling the metaverse as a smooth, branded experience and watching it collapse under its own hype, Theo Triantafyllidis built one that actually works: a giant climbable spider sculpture at Frieze London that doubles as a portal into what he calls the "Feral Metaverse." Tactile. Awkward. Physical. The word "feral" is doing a lot of work here, and it's the right word.
Embodiment as the Metaverse's Missing Ingredient
The arXiv paper "iFLYTEK-Embodied-Omni" this week describes the core challenge for general-purpose embodied AI agents: they must understand multimodal instructions and anticipate how their actions reshape the environment. This is exactly the problem Meta's Horizon Worlds never solved. It treated the body as an avatar selection screen rather than the thing that makes experience real. Triantafyllidis understands this intuitively. His Feral Metaverse insists on friction, on the discomfort of a real body encountering a real object that leads somewhere strange. That is closer to what digital space actually feels like from the inside than any VR headset has managed.
Chloe Wise, UFOs, and the Wildness That Scripture Tames
Nearby at Art Basel, Chloe Wise's "Extrasensory" show is running a parallel argument. "The Bible and religion sanitize and domesticate something that's so wild," she says, talking about UFOs and scripture colliding on canvas. Both Wise and Triantafyllidis are making the same move: rescuing strangeness from the institutions that were designed to contain it. The metaverse was supposed to be strange. It became a mall. Art remembered that portals are supposed to be unsettling. The Beeple and Jehan Chu conversation on digital art as the visual language of everything we see gets at why this matters: digital space is not a destination, it is the texture of contemporary experience, and the artists who render it honestly are the ones willing to keep it feral.