This immersive project offers a rare experience: the chance to see art that has truly never been seen before and will likely never be seen again.
In an era dominated by viral content and algorithms optimized for engagement, a unique art installation designed by Waterloo students is challenging audiences to rethink how value is assigned to art.
Zero Views Museum, featured at this year’s Lumen Festival, immerses participants in a virtual reality (VR) gallery that exclusively exhibits digital artworks with exactly zero views. Once a piece is seen, it disappears permanently from the database, making each visitor both the first and last person to ever see it.
Jayden Hsiao (BASc ’24, systems design engineering), now a master’s student in the Vision and Image Processing Lab, developed the idea in the course CS 889: Interactive Art & Creativity. He noticed that while image-based platforms make popular content easy to find, there is no clear way to discover what has been overlooked. Jayden collected zero-view images by reverse-engineering the Flickr database and then designed a museum environment around them.
“Rather than optimizing for virality, we highlight artworks that have been ignored by the algorithms and put them on a platform to be seen,” said Jayden.
When participants put on the VR headset, they enter a sleek digital museum inspired by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. Inside, six unique works appear, displayed with the same reverence usually reserved for masterpieces. Once the visitor removes the headset, the works are deleted from their system.
“Zero Views Museum creates a very personal experience,” said Jayden. “It asks the question: if you were the only person in the whole world to ever see this art, how would you react to it?”
The images are often modest and personal, adding to the sense of intimacy between the visitor and the artist. To complement the digital experience, the exhibit included a physical twin of the VR experience with teaser images shown on LED matrices blurred by canvases, creating a sense of anticipation of what visitors might see.
“If there’s one thing I want people to take away from Zero Views Museum, it’s the importance of exposing yourself to other perspectives that might not be popular but are still created and advocated for by other human beings,” said Jayden.
Jayden created Zero Views Museum in collaboration with classmate Aaron Dyc (BASc '24, SYDE) and other engineer-artists met through the PRISM Tech Art Collective, Shaan Sawrup a second-year biomedical engineering student and Selina Ding, a fourth-year computer engineering student.