2021
2021 1stDibs Steps Into the Metaverse with NFTs.
The debut of our NFT marketplace is our latest foray into curating the world's most exceptional artwork. We envisioned a space in which top crypto creators and storytellers can come together with a shared passion for innovative digital art.
LaJuné McMillian, Self Portrait 15, 2021
This multidisciplinary artist and educator uses digital art to address, critique and dismantle systems and technologies that uphold societal injustices, which makes room for different ways of being.
LaJuné McMillian, Self Portrait 15, 2021
This multidisciplinary artist and educator uses digital art to address, critique and dismantle systems and technologies that uphold societal injustices, which makes room for different ways of being.
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A Look Into the Metaverse
FROM OUR BLOG
What exactly are NFTs? We answer common questions about the cryptoart that’s taking the world by storm.
Building New Realities: A Conversation with Ogi
The innovative NFT creator talks about the significance of the digital art revolution and how it created an egalitarian new world where are all welcome.
Building New Realities:
A Conversation with Ogi
How have NFTs brought you closer to your community of fellow creators and collectors?
The NFT community is open, welcoming and enthusiastic. It acts as a great leveler, whereby the merit of art can triumph over clout, over the establishment in this crypto-art wonderland. It feels egalitarian, merit-based, rewarding involvement and commitment above everything else with a distinct fervor that only a revolution brings: a digital art revolution.
Reaching out to other creators is easy. Communicating instantly, day or night, on strategy, community, life, and most importantly, art has created an international global interconnected network of artists and art lovers never before seen in human history. It has in turn made me more open; enabled me to communicate more freely, without fear of showing up, of putting something out there in the world and saying: "I made this." The numerical advantage of being in a wave of digitalized, block chained art movement strangely enhances individuality whilst giving the emotional armor of numbers.
Furthermore, lightning interaction between artists and collectors is unprecedented. To be able to have long conversations about our work, our art; to exchange ideas and have live input, discussion and communication is different than anything before. I have made lifelong friends in a short time-space.
The brands of individual artists anchored through their pfps and meta-names and all that is real are their thoughts in the digital rain of the world hurtling towards metaverse. Through NFTs doors previously closed have now been replaced by portals. Daily opportunities in a vibrant art movement spur one's creativity beyond anything previous. I have never before had as many liberating, stimulating and exciting ideas on my art, unlocked from the constraints of cultural media landscapes into the horizon of this new world...the future-now. It has unlocked my creativity beyond my previous possibility and seeded Chorismos.
The recognition of one’s value as a creator, in my case an animator, a world-maker and ultimately, an artist within the community of paradoxically simultaniously diverse and like-minded people has truly been a life-changing experience.
What does the Metaverse mean to you?
Metaverse means many things to different people, to different groups. For me, it is the, currently digital, substratum of our shared human consciousness. It is a dimension beyond the real. It is physical transcendent. It is the world beyond worlds where we all humans meet and interact. Metaverse is text, metaverse is video, metaverse is beyond four dimensions in the social internet exalted. Metaverse in its next form will be virtual expansion with digital spillover into real through augmented, and then ultimately a collision and melding of two galaxies through the conduit of technology.
In the world beyond worlds we are all connected and, what we’re calling metaverse now, are the first steps of realizing that connection irrelevant to the geolocation. Through virtual reality, we come closest to what metaverse can be, infinite, timeless and boundlessly interactive. When I’m creating in the virt I feel that I’m glimpsing this digital future horizon of infinite possibility.
We all live in the imagined reality right now. We agree collectively, globally upon the "rules" of our existence, based on the limited sensory data which form our model of the world around us. We project our thought across times-pace, capture moments of our lives to share like beacons and create mind-expanding evolutionary experiences. We live and exist in a fraction of reality. With metaverse we can expand that reality, hence it is referred to as meta-verse. An infinite, and seemingly inevitable, space for humans to communicate and build new realities which will form our culture and direct our collective consciousness beyond the future-now.
