Theo Triantafyllidis Shows Feral Metaverse at Frieze London

For five days in The Regent's Park, the most interesting booth at Frieze London will be a jungle gym. Feral Metaverse (Spider), Theo Triantafyllidis's commission for the 2026 Frieze London Artist Award, is a giant soft spider you are supposed to climb, and climbing it is a login. Get up onto its legs, usually with a stranger's help, and you enter the artist's shared online world, where players cooperate to form temporary group bodies: towers, wheels, group hugs, spiders.

Feral Metaverse has been growing in public since 2023 as a thought experiment: what would shared digital space look like if it were organized around cooperation, vulnerability, awkwardness and care instead of engagement? It opened with a performance at Onassis ONX's Group Hug in New York in 2024 and showed in Warsaw last year, and the Frieze edition is its biggest body yet. "It feels like a supported leap of faith, and a real next step for the work," Triantafyllidis said in the award announcement. Killscreen covered the artist’s collisions of real-time graphics and live performance back in 2020, and the through-line holds: the body first, the simulation in service of it.

The commission is co-produced with Forma and, for the first time in the award's 11 years, supported by Google Arts & Culture; the fabrication team used Gemini for sketches and renders, then treated the output as raw sculptural material. News of the work traveled the way art news travels now, through a Financial Times portrait session posted to Instagram. Art fairs keep discovering that a game pipeline is an exhibition pipeline, something Gabriel Massan proved at Frieze Seoul just last month. Frieze London runs Oct. 14 to 18; the spider is in the Focus section, and it does not bite.