“What Is Virtual Art – Volume 1”
I'm proud to announce that the Virtual Museum of Virtual Art (VMoVA)'s groundbreaking immersive group exhibition, “What Is Virtual Art – Volume 1”, has been officially selected for the “Best of Worlds” program at Venice Immersive, the extended reality section of the 82nd Venice International Film Festival (27 August - 6 September 2025).
Curated and world-built by Jessien, this ambitious show features new immersive works by four international artists: Zeng Chen, Polaris, Li Tianzhi, and ReVerse Butcher. Each artist explores the evolving language of virtual art through a wide range of techniques including shadow theatre, pop-up architectural storytelling, theatrical scenography, and virtual sculpture.
Venice Immersive is the XR-focused arm of the Venice International Film Festival, which is part of the Venice Biennale. The Venice International Film Festival & Venice Immersive are globally recognized as a bellwether for artistic innovation in cinema and new media. Since 2017, Venice Immersive has been at the forefront of showcasing work in virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), mixed reality (MR), and other extended reality (XR) formats, positioning itself as a critical platform for immersive media and its evolving role in the arts. Its “Best of Worlds” section highlights outstanding international works that challenge conventional boundaries of storytelling, presence, and interactivity.
ReVerse Butcher’s featured work, “Circle Cubed”, is Part 4 and the finale of "What is Virtual Art - Volume 1". It features a large-scale virtual sculpture built in VR, incorporating a layered soundscape and custom VISPO (visual poetry) textures derived from her long-running practice in experimental poetry, collage, and artists books. As the concluding chapter of the experience, “Circle Cubed” anchors the conceptual arc of the exhibition and invites viewers into a richly textured spatial meditation on balance, embodiment, and poetic form.
REFLECTIONS ON "CIRCLE CUBED"
Serving as the emotional and conceptual finale of “What Is Virtual Art – Volume 1”, “Circle Cubed” by ReVerse Butcher is an immersive, interactive virtual sculpture that fuses visual poetry (VISPO), spatial collage, & music composition into a singular, unforgettable spatial experience.
“Circle Cubed” is a Virtual Sculpture, created natively in VR using Open Brush (the open-source version of Tilt Brush), and features a dynamic soundscape and custom VISPO textures—visual poetry textures derived from Butcher’s own artists books and experimental text-based artworks. It engages the body and the viewer’s movement through space as central to its interpretation. Rooted in Butcher’s long history with experimental poetry, visual collage, and performance, “Circle Cubed” extends a lineage of feminist and queer artistic strategies into virtual environments.
At its core, the “Circle Series” is a multi-year, multi-media exploration of cycles—of identity, of evolution, of being suspended in space-time. ReVerse Butcher began the series in 2019 as a set of figurative drawings, incorporating continuous linework, watercolor, digital collage, and eventually 3D sculpture. Each iteration in the series builds on the last, with a recurring motif—the circle—used as both visual anchor and conceptual fulcrum.
“Circle Cubed” is one of the most sophisticated works in the lineage of her "Circle Series" to date, presenting three distinct figures arranged into a tripartite relationship of balance and imbalance. The interaction of these forms—in scale, gesture, posture, and material—suggests the emotional and philosophical weight of holding multiple truths at once, without collapse.
A HYBRID METHODOLOGY
The process behind “Circle Cubed” is as radical as the work itself. The sculptures are hand-sculpted in VR using Open Brush, a derivative of Google’s Tilt Brush. Drawing on a self-taught background in painting, collage, and film/video production, Butcher sculpts forms in three dimensions the same way one might draw: gesturally, with attention to line, texture, rhythm, and emotional weight.
Each segment of the sculpture is grouped and textured separately—a nod to collage methodology, where layers of materials are juxtaposed to create new, emergent meaning. Materials are made from hand-painted pages—created with watercolor, ink, and acrylic on vintage paper—and then digitized, reworked in Procreate, and finally processed into 3D textures in Adobe Sampler.
This technique results in what Butcher calls “3D Collage”—a visual skin that retains the tactile memory of paper and paint, yet lives and breathes in virtual space. These surfaces are reflective, refractive, chromatic—serving both symbolic and formal purposes. The figures’ poses are developed using anatomical studies and 3D posing software like DAZ 3D, combined with extensive research into body language and narrative gesture.
Butcher writes:
“I wanted to make poems that one could move through, that moved through you. This doesn’t happen on the page; it happens experientially.”
The visual poetry (VISPO) used in “Circle Cubed” is derived from Butcher’s decades-long exploration of experimental literary forms—erasure, collage, cut-up, and visual semiotics. Words are sometimes readable, sometimes fractured, serving as texture and semantic debris that reinforces the themes of fragmentation and transformation.
A FEMINIST AND QUEER FRAMEWORK
ReVerse Butcher’s work is deeply informed by her lived experience as a queer female artist resisting the patriarchal norms of both literary and visual art spaces. “Circle Cubed” is not just a formal experiment; it is an act of cultural resistance. It reclaims and re-centers the female and non-binary body—not as object, but as active shaper of meaning, space, and memory.
Her figures are not posed for voyeuristic observation but instead embody tension, introspection, weight, and grace. As she notes, “the sculpture is a metaphor for opposing forces… no binary contrast ever equals balance. Everything needs at least three states to reach any kind of equilibrium, which can also never last, as all states are constantly in motion.”
This tripartite structure—echoed in the title “Circle Cubed”—invites the viewer to confront instability as generative, and to reimagine the idea of equilibrium as a process, not a goal.
THE ARTIST BEHIND "CIRCLE CUBED"
ReVerse Butcher (rVb) is a self-taught artist, poet, worldbuilder, and performer with a career spanning over two decades. Her creative background began in experimental writing and poetry performance, which evolved organically into a multi-modal practice encompassing collage, painting, projection design, video, and sound. Her entry into the visual arts was a response to exclusion—she began cutting, remixing, and painting over oppressive texts as an act of rebellion, using the tools of collage, erasure poetry, and cut-up methods to reclaim power and meaning.
She has published acclaimed artists books such as "On The Rod" and "Kaleidoscopic Erasures", created large-scale visual projections for live performance, and developed a body of immersive video and VR work. During Melbourne’s extended lockdowns, she pivoted entirely into virtual spaces, where she found an infinite canvas for experimentation. It was during this time that she created "The Virtual Circle" and began developing what would become “Circle Cubed.”
The “Circle Series,” to which this sculpture belongs, began as life drawing studies and continuous-line figure illustrations. Over the years, it has evolved into a transmedia project—traversing traditional and digital mediums, ultimately crystallizing in VR as full-bodied, immersive sculptures.
WHAT IS A VISPO TEXTURE?
At the heart of “Circle Cubed” are the VISPO textures—an innovation rooted deeply in Butcher’s long-standing practice in Visual Poetry (VISPO). VISPO is the intersection of poetry and visual art. Rather than using text to be read linearly, it is meant to be seen, interpreted, and experienced. Words are treated as marks, patterns, and symbols—layered into collages, erased from their source, or spliced with images, paint, and typographic distortion. The result is often illegible in the traditional sense, but densely communicative in visual and emotional terms.
In Butcher’s practice, VISPO began as cut-up and erasure poetry on paper, often built from salvaged or discarded texts, painted with ink or watercolor, and bound into artists books. Over time, these materials became the foundation for her visual vocabulary. When she moved into VR, she digitized these pages, edited them in Procreate, and transformed them into 3D textures using Adobe Sampler.
These VISPO textures are then applied to surfaces of her virtual sculptures, turning each form into a living, breathing collage of fragmented meaning. Each figure in “Circle Cubed” carries the aesthetic weight of her entire practice—mark-making, poetry, experimental literature, and painterly abstraction—remixed and transposed into a spatial, digital form.
The result is a sculpture whose surface reads like an artists book: each plane etched with poetic residue, visual texture, and conceptual layering. You don’t “read” “Circle Cubed” in a conventional way—you experience it through motion, through proximity, through immersion.
A NEW KIND OF MONUMENT
“Circle Cubed” is not only immersive—it is durational. With a custom-composed soundscape, recorded in Virtuoso VR, the sculpture becomes a meditative and atmospheric space, designed to be walked through, sat within, and contemplated across time. The audio does not narrate—it envelops. It guides the viewer toward an emotional register of interaction, rather than a didactic one.
As a virtual sculpture, “Circle Cubed” requires no plinth, no gallery wall, no physical frame. And yet, it feels deeply personal, tactile, and human. The figures—crafted from gestural linework, layered textures, and poetic symbolism—occupy space the way memories do: suspended, shifting, haunting, and beautiful.
The process of creating “Circle Cubed” embodies Butcher’s philosophy: that art can be made anywhere, with anything; that tools are only extensions of poetic impulse; and that meaning emerges from repetition, layering, rupture, and play. From her early years of gluing collaged poetry on postcards and slipping them into library books, to this monumental immersive finale, her practice has always sought ways to speak back to power, and to offer alternative languages of resistance, beauty, and vision.
