Athens-based artist Theo Triantafyllidis has been named the recipient of the 2026 Frieze London Artist Award, and will present a new commission, Feral Metaverse (Spider), during this year's fair at Regent's Park from 14 to 18 October. The work is a participatory installation pairing a large, climbable spider sculpture with a live multiplayer game, extending the artist's long-running Feral Metaverse project, which has developed since 2023 through exhibitions and performances that fuse gaming culture, performance art and sculpture. The physical sculpture serves as the entry point into a shared digital environment. Visitors climb onto the spider and join a multiplayer game in which players must cooperate to move, connect and form temporary collective bodies — described as towers, wheels, group hugs and spiders — that emerge through collaboration. Rather than treating technology as something experienced in isolation behind a screen, the work asks participants to climb, balance and physically interact with strangers, imagining a digital commons built around cooperation and care instead of competition. This year's award is being developed for the first time in collaboration with Google Arts & Culture, and is co-commissioned and co-produced with the contemporary art organisation Forma. The 2026 edition specifically invited artists to work with advanced technologies, including artificial intelligence, as creative collaborators rather than as mere subjects of investigation, and Triantafyllidis has built the project with Google AI technologies. The artist calls spiders "the original engineers", describing them as strange, intelligent and unexpectedly tender creatures whose softness and tactility invite physical engagement rather than fear. Established in 2014, the Frieze London Artist Award supports an artist at a pivotal moment in their career to realise an ambitious new work for the fair. Past recipients include Sophia Al-Maria, Lawrence Lek, Adham Faramawy, Abbas Zahedi, Sung Tieu, Alberta Whittle and Himali Singh Soin. Eva Langret, Frieze's director for EMEA, said the commission demands physical presence — being in the room, climbing the sculpture, working it out with strangers. Triantafyllidis said the award lets him assemble his team in Athens and push both the game and the sculptural form further than ever before.