Minetest open source game engine, part of the Quarantine 13 group exhibition, 2020
Concept of the exhibition: Quarantine Artist Collective, аrt world engineer: Felix Molitor
During the Corona-19 lockdown from March to May 2020, Berlin-based Quarantine Artist Collective held their 13th annual Quarantine meetup, this time online using the open-source game engine Minetest.
They invited nearly 50 artists to join the project, in which, over a period of one month, they would create new works in the virtual space of Minetest. Each artist received a plot of virtual terrain on which to build and to present their work. The audience could visit the game as observers to follow the process, chat with artists and with other visitors.
Albena Baeva created The Garden under lockdown in Sofia, where not only closed public spaces but also public parks were off-limits. Locked in a small apartment with her family, Baeva filled the loss of physical space with a virtual garden.
Her work combines hanging gardens, hybrid goddesses from other projects and monsters from her experiments with a Stylegan algorithm she trained on a custom dataset. Her sculptures of the Bitch, the Horse, the Duck, and the Pussy were all adapted for Minetest, rendered as blocks and positioned on different levels in the garden. Looking in four different directions, these creatures protect the green space they surround as if it was an ancient temple. The Garden, although inaccessible in reality, became a sacred place.
