By now, you know that I’m a textile upcycling artist who also showcases my creations in the virtual reality realm - yes, the metaverse. I have gotten a few questions from people who either came to the Climate Gallery exhibition events last November or independently browsed the gallery in their own time about how I made the gallery.
So if you are at the very least bit interested about how I made my Textile Art Virtual Gallery, this newsletter is for you!
Quick catch-up for those who don’t know what I’m talking about:
Climate Gallery launched its inaugural virtual exhibition that focused around climate artivism (art + activism) in November 2022. The project is an initiative by Climate Creative and funded by the California Arts Council.
In addition to being one of the four production team members, I was also selected as one of the 5 climate artists to exhibit alongside Minori Murata, David Solnit, Klara Maisch, and Rose McAdoo. Each climate artist has a building template to load up with artworks and do customizations with, and all five galleries are connected through portals.
During the manned virtual exhibition days (Nov 11 - 15), each artist took turns doing a virtual Artist Talk session, followed by a gallery tour. The galleries stay up permanently after.
You are welcome to explore my Textile Art Gallery (and all other galleries) through your internet-connected devices! Due to the load size of the galleries, however, I recommend you use either Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome browser on your laptop / desktop and close any unused browser window or tab. Have fun!
As you are reading this newsletter, please keep in mind that I approached the virtual gallery development from the combined perspective of a self-taught sewist and an ex-fintech startup product / project manager who is comfortable with hands-on user-centric design (i.e. wireframing, user and data flow, storyboarding, and UI/UX).
Coming into this project, I had ZERO skills in 3D object building or virtual scene making. Accumulating stellar 3D design skills takes years and years to learn, and I am being as realistic as possible about my current skills and expectations given the project timeline. That said, the available resources right now are abundant and it’s easy to start learning about Web3 technology and make things happen.
I hope this newsletter issue will answer the questions of how Textile Art Climate Gallery came to be. Beyond that, I hope more people can be inspired to start exploring the potentials of virtual reality to build community and foster collaborations.
Gallery Concept and Ideation
The fundamental implementation of Climate Gallery project was:
create 5 independent galleries for each artist to showcase their climate works
and have them connected to each othercreate a hub space for them to do their Artist Talk session in.
We considered several VR platforms to realize this vision, and Mozilla Hubs was our choice thanks to its tremendously accessible and beginner-friendly virtual scene making and sharing.
Siobhan, our VR Designer produced a gallery template for each artist to work with in July 2022. Each artists then had about 2 months to get our gallery worked to reach 70-80% doneness, and one more month to do various kinds of touch-ups and last-minute changes before the virtual exhibition was live in November 2022.
First thing I did was starting a Figma Jam file to brainstorm ideas. I’m a believer of meeting the needs of people first, and then creating solutions around them. This project is no different - while the building structure is already set, it’s essentially still a blank canvas ready to host experiences.
So I created a mindmap centering around the Gallery Audience:
I don’t expect anyone to read those tiny lines, so please save your eyesight.
What I’d like to highlight is my thought process:
Who is the target audience?
The core groups are people who are interested in Climate, Art, and Web3 technologies. Within each audience category, I also created 2-3 group segments and their perceived characteristics.How do we have conversations with them (in the virtual gallery)?
Answering this question, I divided the question further into three steps:What topics are they interested or concerned with?
How can we reach, excite, or touch them through these topics?
Can we engage their senses through visual, auditory, or memory of “touch”?
From here, I jotted down design elements around possible dynamic experiences and static elements that I can potentially create and execute.
What is the purpose or relationship between the space to the audience?
Here, I imagine what kind of reactions I’d like the audience to have and what elements are important to them.
Within this question, I also ask the following questions:How do we make people feel better after their visit than when they first arrive (i.e. people’s wellbeing)?
What messages / takeaways do we want to have gallery visitors to have?
Answering these questions got me excited about boiling down the ideas into an inventory of set experiences I wanted to deliver, and only then did I start looking into tinkering with the gallery space.
Building the Virtual Gallery
Initially, I thought of doing BIG customization to the gallery. Adding a second story, converting the area in the middle into a courtyard, creating a big front yard, and so on. I made the design in SketchUp for free and presented it to Siobhan.
We were both excited about the possibility of creating this gallery at first.
But long story short, we both decided that it’s not going to be possible within the timeline we imposed on ourselves, not to mention our still-growing technical skills, as well as increasing workload that we identified along the way.
So in early August, the above idea was scrapped entirely and I was to make my Textile Art Gallery within the constraints of the given template. During this time, both Siobhan and I started to hold technical sessions with Active Replica (now acquired by Mozilla), Climate Creative’s partner in 3D and virtual scene making expert for the Climate Gallery project.
Starting the technical sessions were timely and purposeful. There was an Active Replica collaboration project that the Climate Gallery team participated in later that month. Multiple virtual scenes were connected via portals and visitors could easily hop from one virtual scene to another from the comfort of their web browser tab.
Our contribution was a preview version of my Textile Art gallery, and I had a clear idea of what it would look like. This preview gallery is no longer live, but I still have the floor plan.
Creating 3D Models
The preview gallery’s floor plan might look a bit sparse, however it was still quite a lot of work. Despite the seemingly small number of objects, I learned a great deal about setting up a virtual scene on Spoke by Mozilla Hubs and connecting it with other virtual spaces via those technical sessions. Shout out to Michael Morran for scheduling and holding these sessions!
This preview gallery had a mix of both flat graphic images as well as 3D objects. By this point, I learned how to successfully made “digital twins” of 3 garments and 6 origami boxes. Instead of creating 3D models from scratch, I used photogrammetry method to do 3D scans of my physical creations.
Photogrammetry uses overlapping photos to create a 3D model. Here’s how I did it:
I used my iPhone to take multiple pictures of each object in 360-degree range, be it a 6 ft. tall dress form or 3 in. tall origami box. Photogrammetry works better when you have more photos covering more angles and levels of an object with uniform natural lighting.
I took 50 - 90 photos per object, which were then fed into a free photogrammetry app PhotoCatch (usable for Mac machines with at least M1 chip). It took about 10 - 25 minutes to spit out a 3D object file.
Although the 3D model produced looked great, it’s too large. A Mozilla Hub scene has a maximum size of 128MB, and a dress form’s 3D scans were around 80+ MB as-is. So for each 3D model, I used Blender, an open-sourced 3D modeling software to not only reduce its file size, but also smooth out and repair any digital "bumps" and "cracks" of the model. Imagine working with clay like in pottery, just digitally :)
Here is a 1-minute video of how I made a 3D object out of a physical outfit. You can see the 3D model of this Modern Ethnic outfit is in my Textile Art Gallery.
I’m not going into more details here because Blender by itself can be overwhelming. But please please don’t hesitate to ask if you are curious and want to know more about this process!
That said, I want to give a HUGE shout out to Jordan Elevons who did several one-on-one sessions to mentor me on 3D model optimizations on Blender and how to optimize Mozilla Hubs scene. He is generous and kind, and I really appreciate him taking the time to teach me through these fundamentals.
When my 3D models are optimized with Blender, their sizes can be reduced greatly, sometimes way under 1% of its initial size. Here are a couple of screenshots showing the file size of my 6 origami treasure boxes before and after the optimization process!
In addition to these 3D models, I also had flat graphic images that I made with Canva, saved as either JPEG or PNG files.
Next, using Spoke by Mozilla Hubs scene editor, I placed the 3D models as well as the flat 2D images in the empty gallery. First time I did it, it felt like placing furniture and dolls inside a digital dollhouse. Or playing Mindcraft.
Recruiting Collaborators
Working on the preview gallery made me realize how BIG the space was. I had to enlarge the 3D models by 200 - 300% for them to fill the space and they ended up looking like giants compared to the gallery visitor’s avatars.
I felt this project was a great opportunity to weave artistic voices together, so I started reaching out to several close friends who are fantastic artists themselves. I reached out to 6 parties and was prepared to have a 50% rejection rate, but to my delighted surprise, everyone said YES.
I created two documents to get my collabotors on board:
a Invitation to Collaborate describing the who/what/where/how/why of the project and loose ideas of what the collaboration could look like.
a Creative Brief describing the implementation ideas for each collaborator in a more concrete manner.
By the end of August, I already started receiving new works from a couple of collaborators as well as their bios and headshots!
I am super proud of my 6 collaborators and how we were able to layer our works together in one virtual scene. We all come together from various arts and design disciplines, and I couldn’t stress enough how tremendously special it was to have this collaboration. They are:
Starry Eyed Cadet - a San Francisco indie band inspired by Sarah Records
Jesus Romero - fashion designer, illustrator, and US Army Veteran
Veronica Cipto - graphic designer specializing in packaging design
Cynthia Anderson - runway photographer covering fashion weeks from New York to Copenhagen
Kimberly Kuniko - Nikkei American hapa artist and paper goods designer
Richard Inkyu Kim - improvising violist whose music is featured in Netflix film Advantageous (2015).
For more information about them and their specific contributions to the Textile Art Gallery, please check out their Artist Bios!
Final Gallery Preparations for the Virtual Exhibition
Even though I was careful to do the bulk of 3D model generation early, the later models gave me more grief than I thought. Arranging text-image combo content on the space walls also proved to be challenging, not to mention having to curate a “space” instead of a web page.
All in all, it was an eye-opening experience to realize the shift in perspective needed to realize this virtual exhibition. It calls for an immersive experience beyond the familiar 2D perception. Importance of object placements and their scale, audio zone configurations, object interactivity, gallery lighting and environment… Those were all part of my crash course in creating a viable virtual scene.
My Figma Jam document was the anchor that kept my sanity intact - from keeping the inventory of gallery assets, categorizing them based on types, creating / revising / finalizing those assets, and uploading them to the virtual space.
Below is another section of the document, with big-picture tasks for each month at the top, list of deliverables on the bottom left, and log of almost-daily file uploads to the virtual scene starting at the end of October.
OK fine. I did go somewhat insane at times. Let me give you a bird's eye view of the final gallery’s floor plan. It was a big expansion compared to the preview version, and maybe you would start to understand why I got overwhelmed at times working on my gallery, synching with my Climate Gallery teammates, and keeping in touch with my collaborators for any last minute changes.
SHOW TIME
In a blink of an eye, it’s November 2022. The Climate Gallery team kicked things off with an in-person launch party in San Francisco, during which the audience members had a chance to check out all 5 interconnected galleries (they were about 90-95% done at that point) with a VR headset. We got quite a great reception and some feedback from the audience.
The one-week crunch time afterwards was intense. There were (of course) last-minute edits for ALL of the galleries. Thankfully, the Mozilla Hubs community was (and still is!) incredibly kind and helpful to give any troubleshooting pointers.
All team members were swamped, but everyone has this unspoken knack of looking to help others without being asked. We naturally looked for what holes were still there and immediately helped each other out. One of the best, if not THE best team collaboration I ever had. Hands down.
I continued working on my gallery up to 2 days prior to the opening date. Only then, I started working on my Artist Talk presentation slides. The slides were done only half an hour before my talk was starting, and my hands were icy and numb from all the nervousness.
Giving an Artist Talk in a virtual space felt new and exciting, and it was a great feeling to know the tickets were sold out. That aside, I definitely couldn’t forget how freaked out I was when all 25+ spawned audience members glided towards the presentation screen just before my presentation started. Holy ****.
Throughout the talk, my team members left me alone and made everything else happen (recording, tech troubleshooting, audience guiding, etc.) - again, #bestteamever.
The gallery tour afterwards also went smoothly. The audience members continued to ask questions, examined and reacted to various objects in the gallery, and also teleported to other galleries via the portal room.
Here’s a recording of both the Artist Talk and subsequent Gallery Tour!
If you are interested in having a guided virtual tour in the Textile Art Gallery, shoot me an email at miramusank@gmail.com! Some of my collaborators and I have done 1-hour docent tours in the gallery, where we usually ended up congregating in front of a specific piece that resonated to the group the most and had deep engaging conversations. All without the need to show our actual faces to the camera!
What’s Next
The Climate Gallery’s Artivism Exhibition was no mean feat. Sold out in-person launch party, and nearly sold out events for all 5 official virtual exhibition days. There’s no serious technical outages during the events (thanks to our Active Replica partner), and the initiative also got to support several climate-focused initiatives via micro grants.
Moreover, I got new connections and access to resources in the Mozilla Hubs community - many are experts in 3D modeling / scene making and super generous in sharing their skills.
As of February 2023, I have become the Artist in Residence for Climate Creative in 2023, and this opens the door for me to learn more virtual scene best practices, create more virtual projects and expand connections in the global climate art world! There is so much to explore.
My first virtual project was creating a mini-exhibition virtual space for NAAM Festival’s Kanda La Ziwa project in Kenya, Africa. The week-long project in mid-February was focused to bring awareness and encourage actions to address pollution around Lake Victoria, as well as to celebrate the importance of community and collaboration via music and art festivals.
There are several virtual experiences that are in the works, including a creative retreat with Textile Art Gallery collaborator Kimberly Kuniko. Bookmark her Workshops page and be on the lookout for our co-hosting retreat in April!
Stay tuned for the next iteration of Climate Gallery, and please don’t hesitate to ask question(s), give feedback, or just say hi!
Thank you for reading; until next time,
Mira Musank