Theo Triantafyllidis’s Frieze Project Turns a Spider Into a Portal
At Frieze London this fall, visitors will not encounter a sleek digital fantasy of the metaverse. Instead, they will meet a spider they can climb.
Theo Triantafyllidis, the 2026 Frieze Artist Award winner, will present Feral Metaverse (Spider) at Frieze London from October 14–18. The monumental work is both sculpture and game interface: viewers are invited to clamber over the spider’s bristly body in search of screens and controls that lead into an interactive virtual environment.
The project extends Triantafyllidis’s ongoing Feral Metaverse series, which rejects the polished, frictionless ideal long associated with Silicon Valley’s metaverse ambitions. Born in Athens in 1988, the Greek new media artist trained first as an architect before earning an MFA from UCLA’s Design Media Arts program in 2016. That background has helped shape a practice that moves easily between physical construction, digital simulation, and speculative world-building.
Triantafyllidis has said he wanted to imagine a different path for virtual space, one in which video games become a way to test social behavior. In Feral Metaverse (Spider), the digital landscape is expected to feel less utopian than exposed and difficult. A short demo on Steam already suggests an arid terrain, with avatars moving through it in a stripped-down, almost primal way.
The artist is especially interested in what happens when players must rely on one another. Will they help each other climb the spider? Will the absence of verbal communication sharpen cooperation, or produce conflict? Those questions sit at the center of the work, which treats awkwardness, vulnerability, and care as meaningful forms of virtual experience rather than glitches to be smoothed away.
The spider itself carries another layer of symbolism. Triantafyllidis has pointed to its long art-historical associations with creation and generative power, as well as the unease it can provoke. He welcomes the possibility that viewers may first feel intimidated, then discover, through play, that the creature is meant to be unexpectedly inviting.
AI is part of that process as well. For Feral Metaverse (Spider), Triantafyllidis worked with Google’s Gemini and a feedback loop involving physical models, continuing his interest in what he has described as “A.I. slop” as a material to be shaped. Google Arts and Culture is sponsoring the Frieze Artist Award for the first time this year.
The project builds on earlier experiments, including “Pheromone Spa,” a solo exhibition at Breeder Gallery in Athens in 2022, where he presented “Ork Haus,” a fabricated sofa derived from Midjourney output. There, as in the new Frieze commission, Triantafyllidis treated machine-generated imagery not as an endpoint, but as raw matter for sculpture, fabrication, and play.
