Dear ArtMeta Community,
On Saturday June 18, 2022, we ArtMeta, the first fine art metaverse, brought worlds together at our metaverse premiere event at the Pullman Hotel alongside Art Basel in Switzerland. Our mission is to provide ultimate access to the realm of fine art, by bringing the worlds of fine art and the blockchain together. Hosting this event in partnership with VP Bank Group, TrustSwap, Swappable, Alpha Praetorian Capital, Haas & Company, Liberty Specialty Markets and Night Gallery, helped achieve just that.
Our goal for the event was to showcase the potential of our fine art metaverse by revealing the first neighborhood within the island of Tchan-Zâca. The event featured two contrasting spaces: the brand room and the immersive art experience room. The evening culminated with two back-to-back panels featuring ArtMeta’s partners in discussions on how they come together to create the ecosystem behind the workings of ArtMeta. Our guests also were able to enjoy the NFT gallery, and a never-before-seen digitized Andy Warhol painting at our event.
The Brand Room
In the brand room, guests learned about the story of Tchan-Zâca, the main island of ArtMeta’s metaverse, and its creator — acclaimed artist, Jonathan Delachaux. A 3D-printed model of the island in the center of the room conveyed the shape into which the metaverse will grow in the coming months. Screens placed around the room displayed a loop of ArtMeta’s core product offering, describing its Metaverse, their soon-to-launch $MART Token and its NFT Platform.
The Experience Room
This premiere featured a live demonstration of ArtMeta’s first ever in-metaverse experience. As you entered the dimly lit space, a projection in the center of the room showed scenes from inside the metaverse while you waited to wear one of three VR headsets to experience walking through Place Des Mascarades, the main square within the metaverse, and its first bespoke spaces within. Once the VR headset is adjusted to fit your head, a remote gets placed in one of your hands, and you are instantly transported into the remarkable world of Tchan-Zâca.
The artworks presented inside the metaverse included the NFT collaborations with Night Gallery LA — including the most recent collection from artist Daniel T. Gaitor-Lomack, following his latest solo exhibition in Los Angeles; work by artist Philipp Schaerer in collaboration with Swappable included in their UNICEF charity series; as well as a feature piece of Andy Warhol’s Silver and Blue Marilyn, 1967. These experiences offered a glimpse of the diverse potential of how fine art can be infinitely reconfigured and displayed within a digital environment.
The physical Andy Warhol Silver and Blue Marilyn, 1967, hung on the right side of the room and was the first work guests saw as they entered the space. Directly opposite, on the left side of the room, the digitized counterpart of this masterpiece was featured within a vertically mounted screen. In the metaverse, this piece was displayed in a white room, which transformed into a dazzling scene with multiples of the image surrounding the visitor in an infinite rapid succession, taking over the room, only to disappear, leaving the user to stand face to face with the artwork and admire its detail. This work, provided by and in partnership with VP Bank’s private collection, is soon to be tokenized and featured as part of ArtMeta’s NFT offering.
Daniel T. Gaitor-Lomack, a Los Angeles based artist who’s practice frequently explores the idea of reincarnation, reinvigorating the legacies of the readymade and assemblage was in attendance at this premiere event. His Tell-A-Lie-Vision, 2019 sculpture was another physical feature piece. On the opposite wall were the 7 unique one-of-one NFT’s representing the meta-art version of the physical. These NFTs, first featured at the ArtMeta x Night Gallery event in Los Angeles in March this year, were all elegantly displayed on large vertically mounted flatscreens.
In the metaverse, Tell-A-Lie-Vision, 2022 was represented in a 3D format in its own gallery space, alongside Daniel’s other previously digitized and tokenized sculptures: Corpus #3, 2022 and Chair for a Powerful Painter, 2022. The sale of these NFTs will subsequently make it possible for the physical works to be donated to publicly accessible art institutions and collections.
Each guest spent 10–15 minutes on average in the metaverse; when they put the VR headset on, they loved the feeling of being transported to a place that seemed somewhat familiar. Tchan-Zâca is reminiscent of a historical town with a modern twist, the town itself is a work of art, with details carved in stone and unexpected broken laws of nature.
The gallery experiences, all different, dazzled and amazed. When walking through a gallery door, you were transported, art became immersive, something you wanted to explore and keep exploring: “15 minutes wasn’t enough, I wanted to keep exploring”; “the Marilyn gallery blew me away, I’ve never experienced art this way before”; “I’ve never been so close to the inside of an art piece”; “this is the future”. For ArtMeta, this is just the beginning.
Panels
The first panel of the evening was led and moderated by Dr. Céline Chi Hae Wong, Head of Philanthropy & Impact at VP Bank. The speakers were: ArtMeta’s Co-Founder and CEO, Roger Haas; VP Bank’s Chief Product Officer, Marcel Fleisch; APC Capital’s Managing Director, Quentin Reyes; and Night Gallery’s featured artist Daniel T. Gaitor-Lomack. The discussion was about how these partners first got into crypto and what motivated them to dive into the business of digital assets and the metaverse.
The second panel was led and moderated by Alissa Alekseeva, ArtMeta’s Head of Marketing. The speakers were: ArtMeta’s Co-Founder and CEO, Roger Haas; TrustSwap’s COO and Swappable’s Managing Director, Ivan Anastassov; Liberty Specialty Markets’ Head of Fine Art & Specie for Continental Europe, David Saillen; and Haas & Company’s Managing Partner, Armando Haas. In this panel, the subject was around the acquisition of fine art, how blockchain technology makes this easier, and what is still involved from a traditional standpoint in regards to physical art storage and insurance.
Following both panel discussions, the speakers had the audience engaged with an electric Q&A session. Guests were curious to learn more and become part of ArtMeta’s mission.
We will be sharing video footage from both panels with you in the coming weeks so keep an eye out for it on our Youtube and social channels.
NFTs
ArtMeta’s NFT collections can be found on Swappable using these links:
https://swappable.io/accounts/ArtMeta%20Official
Thank you to our community. Thank you to everyone who showed up to support and experience the metaverse in person and to all of our community who supported us from a distance. To those who could not make it we knew we could not leave you out, so if you haven’t already heard, we would love for you to join us for our metaverse tour in July happening on Twitch. More details to come on this, make sure you’re signed up to our mailing list to get all the info.
Last but by no means least, we would like to extend our heartfelt gratitude to our partners VP Bank Group, TrustSwap, Swappable, Alpha Praetorian Capital, Haas & Company, Liberty Specialty Markets and Night Gallery, as well as our venue provider Pullman Hotel for making the night possible!
Best,
ArtMeta Team
Check out our press coverage for the event:
Block Telegraph: https://blocktelegraph.io/artmeta-brings-fine-art-to-the-metaverse/
NASDAQ: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KuHF7xM03z0
Yahoo Finance: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/artmeta-hosts-premiere-event-basel-152800098.html
Seeking Alpha: https://seekingalpha.com/pr/18832717-artmeta-hosts-premiere-event-in-basel
Markets Insider: https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/artmeta-hosts-premiere-event-in-basel-1031528473
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