Looking Back at Metaverse Art Week 2022: ‘The World is Made of Code’ X Spatial X Decentraland
From 24–28 August 2022, Decentraland hosted its third annual ‘Metaverse Art Week’, which culled together a diverse array of designers, creators, and artists to celebrate, probe, and explore the future of art and the metaverse. The theme of the 2022 edition was ‘The World is Made of Code’, and its events were centered around ‘Soho Plaza’, the main arts district within Decentraland, with other events taking place in the platform’s Voltaire Art District. Soho Plaza was transformed into an open-air-museum for the event, with the space occupied with works by Krista Kim and Nick Knight, among others — which will remain on display until the 2023 edition of Metaverse Art Week. Simultaneously, the celebrated media platform ArtNet played host to a series of events during the five days, as numerous poetry readings by none other than the metaverse’s OR poet and poetry-advocate herself, Sasha Stiltes. Her work in web3 art is centered on her metaverse alter-ego, which works in tandem with a self-trained AI, which she then collaborates with on her art. The NFT marketplace KnownOrigin also hosted their own exhibition as part of the four-day art week events, under the title ‘Crypto Winter’, while the long-established physical auction house Sotheby’s all took part in art week, with the launch of their permanent metaverse collection in Decentraland. Sotheby’s is the only major fine art auction house that has entered the metaverse, by having recreated its London headquarters in the Voltaire Art District; itself already swirling with other art week events during the period of 24–28 August 2022.
MetaMundo partnered with Decentraland and Spatial during 2022’s Metaverse Art Week, which resulted in the world’s first cross-platform venue as part of any metaverse art week that Decentraland’s hosted so far. The events — such as concerts, readings, and viewings — took place in a villa designed by hybrid-creative, and LA-NYC-based metaverse architect, Luis Fernandez. The name of the venue is ‘metaEstates_VILLA’, and it is one of several villas that Fernandez has designed for the metaverse, bringing his IRL architecture and design skills to the metatarsal world of web3, together with MetaMundo. His metaEstates_VILLA was the second digital collectible to have dropped on MetaMundo’s 3D NFT marketplace, during August 2022. The villa itself is a sprawling, ocean-adjacent, luxurious piece of metaverse architecture that recalls the works of Adolf Loos and Mies van der Rohe, with countless columns, planes of marble, and natural stone. The events in the villa were organized around the included work from artists such as Krista Kim, Artistant, David Bianchi, Warbb, and the web3 digital fashion marketplace named The Fabricant, who showed off their newest looks and what’s in digital fashion’s future.
Metaverse Art Week will be back with its next edition in summer of 2023.
We hope to see you there. And until then: take time to enjoy looking at art!
