The strangest seat in Frieze London this week may be the one inside a giant spider. Theo Triantafyllidis, the winner of this year's Frieze Artist Award, has unveiled his new commission Feral Metaverse (Spider) (2026), a participatory sculpture shaped like a six-legged arachnid kitted out in deconstructed trainers and medical-hued stockings. The award gave the artist the platform and resources to realise the work at the fair, which runs until 18 October.

Billed as part social experiment, the piece incorporates a collaborative multiplayer video game. Visitors traverse a fantastical world together in an attempt to escape a giant spider, and Triantafyllidis has said he hopes people will simply discover and explore the space together without needing explanations. Those with arachnophobia may want to give it a wide berth; everyone else is invited to take a seat and get involved.

The work extends the artist's playful exploration of the slippage between physical and digital realities. Triantafyllidis began working with image-generation tools in 2022, when he used an early, unsophisticated version of Midjourney to design a piece of furniture for an installation at Breeder Gallery in Athens. For the new spider, he developed a more iterative process, feeding his own sketches into Google's Gemini to generate photorealistic renderings and using an ongoing feedback loop between the software and physical models to decide materials and details.

The artist has described the most interesting aspect of working with AI imagery as its materiality, noting that the statistically generated pixels read as more textural than expected. In the middle of a fair week crowded with sales reports and market analysis, the spider offers something closer to a playground: a commission that treats gaming, collective play and the weirdness of machine-made images as materials in their own right.