Paper-Thin is a virtual platform and archive I created with Daniel Alexander Smith back in 2015. It has had 3 iterations over the years, and continues to grow today.
V1 and V2, the first two iterations, are virtual exhibition spaces/museums designed in the Unity game engine and hosted online, either as an in-browser experience or a download.
For each version, we invited artists to create new work only existing on this virtual interactive platform, and sent “rooms” of the space to them for modification/installation.
Here are the artists in V1:
- Alan Resnick
- Hunter Jonakin
- Daniel Baird and Haseeb Ahmed
- Rachael Archibald
- Hugo Arcier
- Andy Lomas
We interviewed each artist extensively, and you can find those here.
Here are a few of the interviews, releases, and reviews of V1 and V2:
https://rhizome.org/editorial/2016/jan/20/review-rachael-archibald-carnate-in-pinking/
https://anti-utopias.com/newswire/paper-thin-virtual-art-platform/
For V2, we created an entirely new, unfixed architecture that was designed in opposition to V1’s traditional white-cube style.
Here are the artists we had in V2:
- Zachary Norman
- Mark Dorf
- Brenna Murphy
- Martina Menegon
- Adam Ferriss
- Shane Mecklenburger
Paper-Thin V3 existed in a dramatically different fashion, and you can read more about that here.
Paper-Thin as a whole has been written about extensively, including a PhD dissertation on the subject from UNC Chapel Hill’s Colin Post and an MA dissertation from University of Sussex’s Ruby Rees-Sheridan.