![]() ![]() “You can have this stable state where everyone’s got connectivity, everyone’s got a screen, everyone’s got an input method-and that’s all that’s needed for virtual consumption,” he said. What he pictures is a world in which much of what we do in the material economy now-telling the world who we are, exploring our identities, showing off our tastes or our skills and so on-is done through virtual consumption while real-world consumption shrinks to focus mainly on material needs. He can tell an edible mushroom from a toadstool and brings Finnish bilberries and wild game meat back to England so that he can avoid eating mass-produced food. Like many Finns, he typically spends part of each year in a rustic cabin (“except the mobile connectivity is always much better even than in Oxford”). V ili Lehdonvirta isn’t out to abandon physical reality for the matrix. The big-bang expansion of online activity during the pandemic has come to be known as the “digital surge.” Would we do it? Turn our backs on malls, shops, theatres, restaurants, stadiums, spas, and resorts and carry on as virtual consumers? Life in pandemic quarantine seemed to provide an answer, and it was an emphatic yes. All you’re doing when you turn one virtual garment into another is “flipping bits”-changing one kind of digital information into another. The fashion cycle can go faster and faster without increasing material requirements or the environmental footprint,” Lehdonvirta said. It is a world of total abundance, in which endless novelty, passing fads, and planned obsolescence are rendered nearly harmless. In virtual reality, Keynes’s “economic problem” has decisively been solved. This is all potentially good news, said Lehdonvirta, who first learned to write basic code in the mid-1980s, when he was five or six years old. ![]() Shopping Malls Might Not Be Coming Back.The scene was quaintly surreal: two figures in living, face-to-face conversation, accepting the end of that era. Instead, Lehdonvirta told me, they talked about whether Yamamoto could take his art into the three-dimensional space of virtual reality, such as the game world of Animal Crossing, where so much more of Tokyo-and the rest of the world-was hanging out that night. They didn’t discuss whether live audiences would return to galleries soon, however, or how to lure them back to the physical world. He rode the subway through the quiet megalopolis, showed up at the gallery, and spent two hours with the artist. Lehdonvirta, who usually works from the Oxford Internet Institute, suddenly realized that he could go keep Yamamoto company: he was, after all, in the same city where the exhibition was happening. Richly textured and made with materials such as gold leaf, which reflects light differently when seen from different angles, his artwork is hard to fully appreciate in online photos, and Yamamoto was lamenting the fact that the gallery was empty. His most famous piece emulates a four-hundred-year-old folding screen depicting the classical gods of wind and thunder-but replaces them with Nintendo’s Super Mario Brothers. The artist, Taro Yamamoto, makes modern art grounded in Japanese tradition. ![]()
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