Manuel Rossner (German, b. 1989) designs digital spaces and virtual worlds that merge architecture with three-dimensional software, treating digital materials such as light, depth and physics as sculptural material in their own right.,Based in Berlin,he often builds site-specific virtual reality and augmented reality extensions of museums and galleries, exploring how digital spaces reshape the experience of art and architecture.
Rossner, born in Heilbronn, Germany, studied at the University of Art and Design Offenbach, the École des Arts-Décoratifs in Paris and Tongji University in Shanghai.,In 2012, he founded Float Gallery, a virtual exhibition space built with architectural visualization software, and first invited other artists to explore the space before exhibiting his own work there.,He has since used the same virtual reality tools and cinema visual-effects software to model architecture as he uses to draw and paint, blurring the line between digital sculpture and painting.
In his 2019 solo exhibition “There's No Feeling, Where There's No Pain” at the Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig, he built a digital exhibition space as a training “gym” in which an artificial intelligence learned to walk and follow a ball.The following year, his solo show “Surprisingly This Rather Works” at König Galerie in Berlin, curated by Anika Meier and Johann König, turned the brutalist St. Agnes church into a virtual gaming environment inspired by the 1990s show American Gladiators and the training gyms AI companies such as OpenAI use for research.,For the group exhibition “Out of Space” at Hamburger Kunsthalle in 2021, he drew a virtual reality line that crashed through the museum's architecture to create the site-specific installation How did we get here?, which the museum said would enter its permanent collection as its first NFT.,
In March 2021, he rebuilt König Galerie's St. Agnes space inside Decentraland for the show “The Artist Is Online”, curated by Anika Meier and Johann König, and made two looped animations for it, Drop Sculpture and Drip Painting.,In 2022, his work Spatial Painting (Kunsthalle Zürich) was shown in the VR section of the exhibition “How To Do Your Own Research”, curated by Nina Roehrs at Kunsthalle Zürich.That same year, he built Ideal Disruption, a smartphone-app VR tour of an exhibition space for Hyundai Motorstudio Busan.He has also auctioned work through Sotheby's,and founded New Float, a digital exhibition space built on a Berlin construction site beside the Neue Nationalgalerie to house his own collection.
