Marco Brambilla (born 25 September 1960) is an Italian-born Canadian contemporary artist and film director, known for re-contextualizations of popular and found imagery, and use of 3D imaging technologies in public installations and video art. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; SFMOMA, San Francisco; Borusan Contemporary, Istanbul; the Museum of the Moving Image, New York; Metronóm Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Barcelona, Spain and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. Career Style and themes Pop culture as spectacle Jumping off from his experience in Hollywood filmmaking, Brambilla's work explores the history and influence of pop culture through the lens of Guy Debord's "spectacle," or how images commodify human experiences by oversaturation. In an interview with 032c, Brambilla discussed how Hollywood film has "largely become an exercise in spectacle," hyper-saturating the media landscape with pop-culture imagery. In doing so, his work comments on "our ability to absorb images, our ability to be distracted, our ability to be entertained - our ability to be confronted with all those things simultaneously." While the theme of pop culture as spectacle is particularly prominent in his Megaplex series — using scenes, characters and images from films to create elaborate "video collages" — his work broadly deals with "transition, our culture's constant acceleration and emotional connection and disconnection through technology." In this respect, Brambilla satirizes mass media, which "can be interpreted as apocalyptic or Utopian in nature." In a review by The Art Newspaper's extended reality panel, Eron Rauch describes "Heaven's Gate," one of four artworks from his Megaplex series, as an example of American maximalism in art, comparing it to "Patrick Nagatani or Andrée Tracey; prestige TV openings; Daniel R. Small’s wry archaeology of the set of Cecil B De Mille's The Ten Commandments; “magic eye” books; California sci-fi cults; Broadway theatre set flats rotated by stagehands during musical numbers; and some manner of collision of 90s animated GIF-laden Tripod pages; and the panoramic fractalling of Jackson Pollock." Metaverse The term "metaverse" was coined by Neal Stephenson in the book Snow Crash, which constitutes Stephenson's vision of how a virtual reality-based Internet might evolve in the near future, exploring subjects on cryptography, memetics, and the dawn of the information age. Resembling a massively multiplayer online game (MMOG), the Metaverse is populated by user-controlled avatars, as well as system daemons. In late