VERSNIZ – Audiovisual Worldbuilding through Live Coding as a Performance Practice in the Metaverse

Even before the circumstances the global pandemic forced, a diverse ecosystem of technologies and artistic practices for performances in digital and virtual media was raising. Thus, not only is there a sustained interest in transferring existing performance practices into said media, but it also leads to the emergence of new practices and art forms they enable. In particular, immersive, networked, virtual multiuser environments (summarized under the term "metaverse") offer many possibilities for creating new art experiences that need to be explored. In this paper, we present VERSNIZ, a system for audiovisual worldbuilding, the spatial shaping of virtual environments, as a collaborative real-time performance or installation practice. It combines gamification concepts, known from popular sandbox video games, with the performance practice of live coding based on the esoteric programming language IBNIZ. We describe the technical implementation of the system, as well as the resulting artistic concepts and possibilities.