At the beginning of the Corona crisis, we believed that the virtual world already overlapped the real one to such an extent that we would have the opportunity, purely through media, to experience closeness despite physical distance. However, the fallacy and the disillusionment that followed were not long in coming. Very quickly we realized that we are all just sitting behind a large screen that has no a really perceptible social dimension with those on the other side of this disk can neither transport nor transcend in a real-experiential way - i.e. we are medially once again only observing onlookers. What we to feel social dimensions at least approximately, is immersion - but not in the form of expensive special effects, which would run out of steam anyway after only one like e.g. movies in 3D with glasses on. More in demand
are solutions that don't want too much.

The project "close from afar" includes an exhibition, which provokes the feeling of closeness as well as an immersive product that functions as an application at the interface where the virtual world does not yet completely overlap the real world. Embedding this application in the overall dynamics of the metaverse makes it possible to experience a social dimension and transform it so that it transcends itself in a way that can be experienced in real terms. In order for the world of the metaverse to actually generate those social triggers and thrusts, the immersive content application will not merely generate replicas of what we already know, but will allow us to experience insights, accesses and experiences that are physically inaccessible to us in the real world.

​

About the artist: Jens Joneleit is a painter, composer, musician, designer, innovator, screenwriter, director and writer and he is considered a multi-talented. In 2021 Joneleit "Rethought Beethoven" and completed Ludwig van Beethoven's 10th symphony, which the latter had only written down in outline before his death. It was a a commission from the Le Concert Olympique with performances at the DeSingel in Antwerp and then at the Berlin Philharmonie. And that is just one ingenious thing in Jens Joneleits artistic life. He also invents products, paints works of art, currently Remixes of renown artworks, a project with Galerie Arimont. His entire artistic output in all genres and media is "part of the same concern," as the internationally renowned theater maker and composer Prof. Heiner Goebbels put it in a laudatory speech, comparing him to Robert Wilson. Every medium, every artistic activity, he said, is "part of an artistic whole, even if there are no direct references between the activities, which transcend the various disciplines." Joneleit's concern in all his cross-disciplinary creative fields of activity and media is to constantly re-examine them both in terms of content and aesthetics, in search of some kind of narrative and new possibilities, and it is in the midst of all these fields that innovation emerges.