Virtual Bhutan Presentation at Fast Company Innovation Festival
A new virtual Bhutan travel and art experience from META Foundation was unveiled during the closing event of Fast Company Innovation Festival at NeueHouse Madison Square on September 29, 2021.
The new VR experience transported visitors to an artistic interpretation of Bhutan — a remote Buddhist kingdom in the Himalayas that measures happiness instead of GDP — as seen through the eyes of Bhutan's leading contemporary artist, Asha Kama, whose artwork has been virtualized for the very first time thanks to a landmark collaboration with the META Foundation. The virtual exhibit was available for the public to view from September 29th to December 4th via the Spatial app.
Asha Kama was given the keys to Krista Kim’s Mars House -- the world's first NFT house (which sold for $512,000) -- where he exhibited the first of his new Windhorse sculpture series, which also exists in the physical world, before being auctioned off as an NFT—a first for him, and possibly his home country. Proceeds from the sale will go to supporting VAST Bhutan, a contemporary art collective and NGO that promotes art and community service among youth, which Asha Kama co-founded in 1998, and efforts to virtualize Bhutan for tourism and education purposes.
“As a country that has always had a sustainable approach to tourism, Bhutan offers a unique case study for pioneering a purpose-driven prototype for VR travel,” said META Foundation co-founder Savinien Caracostea. “The exhibition explores how VR Tourism can connect visitors to real communities to support and fuel local economies, while fulfilling and inspiring travel dreams from afar.”
Inspired by the motif on traditional Buddhist prayer flags, which today are made of synthetic, non-biodegradable materials, Windhorse is a commentary on both the environment and (im)permanence. The sculpture is made of fallen, faded prayer flags, which Asha Kama and his students have collected from the mountains surrounding capital-city Thimphu, hoping to breathe new life into the prayers of those who put them there and stir up conversation about this cultural tradition in the age of commercialization and mass consumption.
“This sculpture is an attempt at realizing my 30-year old dream of understanding the windhorse phenomena and its side effects—from evoking the spiritual warrior within all of us, to our inability to control our desire of wanting more luck and protection, which has manifested itself in the form of littered mountain tops,” explained Asha Kama. “This attempt will reemerge and multiply in the coming year as part of a new outdoor art festival that I’m conceptualizing.”
While this concept had been percolating for a long time, it took the collaboration with Krista Kim and META Foundation to both refine and jolt his vision to life. “Virtual art is perfect for reinterpreting the ‘virtual’ horse,” said Asha Kama.
“Nothing is permanent in life so we must live in the moment and combine our energies in order to create something new and then that too will go away. For me, that is the metaverse—an illusion, just like life itself,” said VAST Bhutan Executive Director Chimi Zangmo.