Maria Vorobjova
Wood Wide Web
Sharing a network allows plants and fungi to grow, survive and flourish more easily than their neighbours lying beyond the common network. In building this Wood Wide Web, they can free themselves from competing for resources by distributing them amongst themselves, whether faced with surplus or scarcity.
Maria Vorobjova, Wood Wide Web, 2021. Courtesy of the artist.
Maria Vorobjova, Wood Wide Web, 2021. Courtesy of the artist. 
Maria Vorobjova, Wood Wide Web, 2021. Courtesy of the artist.
Taking the role of a Mycorrhiza Helper Bacteria (MHB), Maria Vorobjova’s project Wood Wide Web (2021) explores their world through a video game style playthrough and weaves parallels between natural-human ecosystems and ecological-interpersonal bonds. Its visual and conceptual influence comes from the starry-eyed fantasies surrounding the internet communities in the 1990s, envisioning an escape into a boundless digital utopia and radical network of care and mutual aid. Maria Vorobjova tries to evoke the ideas of the internet communities at the turn of the century by creating microcosmic utopian cyberspaces, characterized by the early internet aesthetic. A nostalgic digital environment of the biological office space in low resolution with supersaturated colours, pixelated textures, and glitchy animations is an autonomous dreamworld that offers countless possibilities beyond the confines of capitalist structures which dominate today's corporatized metaverse.
Maria Vorobjova, Wood Wide Web, 2021. Courtesy of the artist.
Maria Vorobjova, Wood Wide Web, 2021. Courtesy of the artist.
Maria Vorobjova (1996) is a London-based RCA graduate now working as a freelance graphic artist and art director, creating work in the fields of music, fashion, gaming and underground culture. Her practice weaves the threads of play and care between collective joy and online communities, particularly within the realm of early cyberculture. By collecting, constructing and curating with IRL-URL artefacts, she forges boundless dreamscapes and techgnostic utopias. When she’s not building little virtual worlds, she is working as a freelance designer. Her work has been featured in The New Yorker, Dazed, The Face and People of Print, and her clients/collaborators include Boiler Room, NTS, Off World Live, En Masse Festival, BRICKS magazine and the record label Hypercolour.
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