A version of this story appeared in the February issue of VICE magazine. Click HERE to subscribe.
In 2011, Alfredo Salazar-Caro smuggled a mini projector into Mexico City’s Museo Soumaya and cast a GIF onto the wall next to a Joseph Beuys piece. The digital graffiti got him kicked out of the museum, but two years later, Salazar-Caro co-founded the Digital Museum of Digital Art (DiMoDA), where he could put whatever the hell he wanted on the walls.
Today, he’s an adjunct instructor at New York University and a well-respected member of the Chicago Dirty New Media movement, which sets out to break software to create new kinds of visuals, and with DiMoDA, he’s opted to abolish walls entirely: The museum is completely virtual. The artwork doesn’t hang on walls; it is the wall—and the floor, ceiling, and everything in between. To enter, visitors don a virtual reality headset and enter a building with a crystalline façade that would make Frank Gehry drool. Inside, they visit each level by walking straight into a column.
DiMoDA’s website says it’s “the preeminent Virtual institution devoted to Digital/New Media Art,” but for some, it may simply be a rare experience that makes strapping a smartphone to one’s head worth it. Everything inside feels like a mini video game: The current exhibition, DiMoDA 2.0: Morphé Presence, includes a glitchy black-and-white landscape, an uncanny journey inside the human body, a soothing rainbow cube, and a pacifistic take on DOOM.
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