New commission for the Virtual Reality offices at Google

Tucker Nichols, Suborbital Transport, 2018
12 x 24'
Stickers, labels, ink
Virtual/Augmented Reality offices, Google, Mountain View, CA

Humans have been exploring the boundary between the virtual and the real since we first painted in caves or told stories around a fire. As a species, we find essential meaning in imagined, virtual worlds. Technology is expanding these realms into places we’ve never been, and can hardly picture.

Dropping into Google’s VR/AR headquarters as an observer, I see how the line between these worlds is not as distinct as I thought, and getting blurrier all the time. This mural is a kind of 2D mindmap of my impressions of the relationship between real and virtual worlds. It includes observations from my time at Google, examples of historical virtual realities and the people who shaped them, fears and promises of the expanding technologies, personal experiences from my own memory drive, a few lines of code, and ads for local businesses, among other things.

At this point, it’s clear that these technologies are inevitable. But as we adopt them, I wonder: how might they evolve if we saw them against the background of our core human needs? Deep down, what are they connecting us to?  -- TN