The metaverse as a virtual parallel world and next manifestation of the internet has prompted wide-ranging debates ever since the blockchain hype got started. Yet the ability to build and…

The metaverse as a virtual parallel world and next manifestation of the internet has prompted wide-ranging debates ever since the blockchain hype got started. Yet the ability to build and shape worlds through the manipulation of social, real, and imaginary spaces has arguably been a key aspect of artistic and scientific creativity throughout the eras. Accompanying the exhibition at the Francisco Carolinum in Linz, the scientific anthology Meta.space—Visions of Space from the Middle Ages to the Digital Age is the first publication to examine this multifaceted history from an art-historical perspective. Gathering seventy-five positions in analog as well as digital and inter-media art, it offers a foundational contribution to the current debates over the metaverse. The palette of subjects ranges from studies of early painterly solutions to problems of pictorial space emerging in the fifteenth century and the question of how works of sculpture engender spaces to the sensory, scholarly, and technological practices of charting spaces and a critical engagement with the dystopian as well as utopian potentials of today’s cutting-edge conceptions of metaspaces.