...No Code, The Metaverse & Superblue

Written By Isotta Page

SEASON 1 EP 06

Mentioned in this episode:

Episode Transcript:

Hi, it's me Isotta. Welcome to Episode 6 of Art Is… a seven-part podcast for artists. Last episode, we explored startup thinking and R&D practices. Looking into how we can learn from other industries and begin using a more interdisciplinary approach to thinking about our professional development. 

Today, we will explore how art experiences are undergoing radical change. In-person art events have been less common because of the pandemic restrictions and those that have happened have strict rules, limited capacities, and often taped off pathways. You must follow around rooms and gallery displays.

Because in-person gatherings have been so restricted, art in the online world has flourished. Online-only artists communities have formed, digital art is booming, and online exhibitions are now the norm. Pandemic conditions have accelerated progress for internet native communities,  experiences, and goods. Of course, there was interest in these areas before COVID times, but the audiences paying attention have now widened dramatically.  

I feel like over the past year, there's been a rapid evolution of how we look at and experience art online. However, as the online art world developed, experiential and immersive art has also grown. So today we will be exploring the increasing hybridity between the digital and physical worlds in art and how this shapes our future vision for the art industry. 

But before we dive into the episode, I wanted to mention the Art Is… Bookshop created through bookshop.org– an online platform built to financially support local, independent bookstores. It's important to me that this art podcast is a resource for you so I've carefully curated a selection of books for your continued professional and personal development. You can find links to both the UK and US bookshops in the episode description and on the Art Is… Instagram and Twitter (@artispodcast). By purchasing books through these links, you'll be supporting independent bookstores and this podcast. Thanks, and enjoy!

This is Art Is… a podcast where we visualize the future of the art world and talk art.  Coronavirus has dramatically reshaped how we experience and enjoy art. The exhibition, probably the most common format of viewing art, is undergoing dramatic change.

Last April, I was in the Royal Scottish Academy's annual exhibition, which was online for the first time and its 194 year history. Their online interface was pretty straightforward. Each artist had a little profile where they displayed selected photos of their work and accompanying these was a 2D render of a gallery wall where the work was displayed. Flanking the work was a digital rendition of a chair to help discern the scale of the exhibited piece. 

The first time I saw this kind of 2D rendering was in the online viewing rooms of the Art Basel Hong Kong fair. However, pretty quickly, lots of different online exhibition formats propped up.   Some of these formats are creative mediums in their own right like the Alternative Degree Show Exhibition put on by Glasgow School of Art Students in 2020 which was an interactive video game where you could wander around a 3D space and see all the exhibited work. 

Over the past year, the quantity, quality, and diversity of online exhibitions have been astonishing. From videos of physical spaces to 3D renderings and Matterports, there's been more overlap of the physical and digital than ever before. Although so many exhibitions were canceled and opportunities missed, I'm excited about the development of digital viewing experiences and the normalization of making, enjoying, and purchasing art online, which is good for overall innovation and expansion in the art sector.   

It's interesting how, despite the NFT craze that's still going on, the way we look at NFTs is not particularly innovative–it's just simple websites or marketplaces, like open sea or nifty gateway,  which in my mind, act as eBay or Amazon's for digital art. I think there's so much room for innovation in the presentation of online artwork, especially work that's for sale and the best people to innovate and explore in that sector are artists. However, learning how to code to facilitate these kinds of changes has stood in the way of this kind of growth. 

Recently, I have been looking into the power of No Code tools. There are so many out there, especially for web design, that you probably already use like Squarespace and Wix. But have you heard of Bubble and Airtable, Gumroad, Zapier, or Thunkable? These are powerful tools designed to help creatives build apps, digital connections, websites, and more all without writing any code. 

Although I work primarily in sculpture-making objects in 3D space, I'm really excited about having control over how I display and share my work online. 

In fact, something that I've always been really interested in is exploring how to better showcase the nuances and behind-the-scenes part of making art. As in sharing the research that went into developing concepts or material compositions I've made over time. I think video, audio, and more interactive displays in 2D, 3D, or VR could be really exciting.  And as I discussed in Episode 3, there are now interesting and innovative ways to showcase and distribute that work through monetization with NFTs as well. 

The intersection of online culture and the traditional art world has been fascinating. From the anonymous crypto millionaires bidding at auction houses like Christie's and Sotheby's to the overlap of white cube elite minimalism and glitchy gamer aesthetics. The NFT boom has prompted some very interesting and challenging conversations like the ecological impact of NFTs and blockchains, but I have been particularly interested in the inadvertent discussion around online-only art experiences and exhibitions. 

A notable example, here is the work being done by Metapurse, a fund-collecting NFT’s, which was founded by Metakovan–the crypto entrepreneur who purchased Beeple’s The First 5,000 Days. Metakovan has a keen interest in art and has a particular vision for the future of how we will look at and engage with art moving forward. His team is working with virtual architects, designers, and engineers called Voxel Architects, who are building three online museums to house the monumental Beeple work. 

These museums exists on digital real estate and digital worlds called Crypto Voxels, Somnium Space, and Decentraland. Metapurse is also collaborating with Justin Blau, a DJ and crypto entrepreneur, to infuse these spaces with original soundscapes. This sounds super complicated because it is, and apologies if I got any of these details incorrect… I'm a novice crypto explorer. 

On that note, if you'd like to learn more about Metapurse, the Metaverse, and these online museums, I recommend you check out the list of articles I compiled for this episode. You can access these in the resource section of artispodcast.com. I'll also be linking that in the episode description. 

The concept of showing digital art as if it were in real life but in all digital space sounds kind of crazy. In fact, Metapurse is calling it a ‘cultural renaissance inside the Metaverse’. It's like a video game art museum where you can interact with other users and see thousands of works of art. 

Personally, I'm fascinated by this and excited to delve deeper into the implications of these projects in Season 2. The hybridity happening at the moment between the digital and physical world is remarkable. To a certain extent, this interaction is not new. Digital architecture and gaming and digital sculpture and animation have been around for decades, but the intersection happening at the moment because of NFTs is fascinating. And as we learn more about things like virtual art museums and the Metaverse and discover the visions of non-art world natives like Metakovan who work outside of the mainstream traditional art world, it's interesting to remark upon the increasing blending of mediums occurring. 

There's a boom at the moment around spectacles, creating multi-dimensional places in the digital realm or physical world that wows you. Appealing to multiple senses and triggering emotional reactions. A perfect example of that is Superblue, a museum that's due to open this spring in Miami.  

Superblue is an interdisciplinary art experience. The inaugural installations include works by Es Devlin, James Turrell, and teamLab who have all created immersive experiences. Think of crazy Burning Man artwork meets sleek Apple store where boundaries between fine art and other disciplines are broken down so, that it not only attracts those interested in art, but broader audiences interested in fashion, theatre, design, live music, dance, and more. 

It's an opening up of art, which is kind of what Miami has been known to do since Art Basel existed there. Superblue is meant to incite wonder and excitement. Expanding contemporary art audience beyond the elite while also proposing an interesting new revenue model for artists. That to me is reminiscent of the NFT royalty smart contract model.

Superblue pays each artist an upfront fee to create an immersive work as well as a royalty from the gross ticket sales throughout its run. Superblue is an initiative coming out of the Pace Gallery and their leadership is claiming that it could be one of the biggest impacts on human consciousness since movies are phones. So to me, that sounds equally as ambitious as the cultural renaissance happening in the Metaverse.

I find it really interesting that digital art spaces, like the Metaverse, are seeking to imitate physical ones like museums. And physical ones like Superblue are starting to create digitally infused art experiences of their own. Both of these digital and physical worlds are interested in exploring new mediums while championing interdisciplinarity. 

Boundaries are being broken down and the art business divide is being explored head-on by those internal in the traditional art market and those external in the crypto world. Artists are exploring new business models. And now we too can take things into our own hands. With No-Code tools. 

There are so many creative nuances to be explored and flushed out and I'm excited about this new wave of collaboration across disciplines and industries. What do you think? 

Thanks for listening to Episode 6 of Art Is... This week, I'd like to thank Cat Davidson, the Art Is… intern. Thank you for being an early believer in Art Is...

I would also like to thank you for listening to and sharing the podcast with other emerging artists and creatives. See you next Monday for the final episode of Season 1. If you'd like to be featured in Season 2, please write to us on Instagram, Twitter, or email listen@artispodcast.com. Thanks and see you soon! 

Isotta Page
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