Author: Habib William Kherbek

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Image credit: Ania Catherine and Dejha Ti, On View, 2019

Habib William Kherbek on the future of digital assets, images curated by Ania Catherine and Dejha Ti.

Arriving in the metaverse:The coming community, where we will be free to create new forms of identity, culture, and communication, will free us from the harsh constraints of various social and structural entropy that the physical world faces. The Metaverse will allow us to create a world unconstrained by hierarchy... wait, we're getting a message from a Decentraland correspondent, what's that? Sotheby's just opened an auction house in Decentraland? This is incredible news, especially for artists because of how many of them have already sold their work through Sotheby's. It looks like the Metaverse lived up to all our expectations and even surpassed them, the Metaverse surpassed reality.

for those unfamiliar withDecentraland（MANA）image description

Ania Catherine and Dejha Ti, On View, 2019, commissioned by SCAD Art Museum, still installation, courtesy of Operator

What will the metaverse economy look like? is a catch-all question. But as Crypto.com’s “partner content” in the Financial Times suggests, it won’t be entirely unrecognizable from our own verse. The unknown author—who knows, maybe the ad was written entirely by AI—notes that the expanding virtual world has shown "the beginnings of real societies, with individuals settling land, engaging in social interactions, exchanging goods, and asserting ownership. "Meeting new 'verses, same as old' verses...

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Ania Catherine and Dejha Ti, installation view, 2019

The profound inscription of enclosure logic as a feature of the Metaverse should be familiar to anyone who has been observing the behavior of the companies that make up the vast majority of the digital economy as they lock in their advantages. The ability to surround and seek rent is the pattern of nearly every company in the platform economy, as anyone who has tried ordering an Uber in recent years will know. Of course, platform companies are only building digital economy giants, building logic, infrastructure: Amazon, Google, and last but not least Facebook sorry Meta.

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Ania Catherine and Dejha Ti, installation view, 2019

As far as art is concerned, Zuckerberg's promotional video provides a clear example of the kind of art that will flourish within the logic of the metaverse. For those who don't remember or have blocked it, Zuckerberg and his metaverse pals were playing cards on a zero-gravity holodeck "designed by creators in Los Angeles," and Zuckerberg contacted a "friend ’, Naomi, who was late, told Zha as she wandered around Soho, another “creator” secretly releasing AR artwork in various parts of the city. “3D street art,” Zuckerberg asked, his voice almost betraying real emotion. Naomi sends a link to a poker game from Hell, and the metaverse space appears in front of them on the curve of an "amazing" tentacle. “Wait, it’s disappearing,” Zuckerberg exclaimed, perhaps having read the audience’s minds and detected their will to live. "Wait a minute, I'll tip the artists and they'll expand it (the metaverse)," Naomi told Zha. Refreshed by micropayments, the artwork can continue to be entertained by all, and the day is saved.

However, at least for my taste, the work Naomi sent to Zha didn't quite live up to the lofty standards of NFT classics like the Lazy Lion project. However, the logic is clear: the art industry platform economy will suffer from the same infinite commodification as data, and art may be generally available for as long as the artist may want it to be, but the art favored by the metaverse economy will follow the same path as those seeking Same rent-seeking logic for those who occupy the space. As an isolation medium for exchanging value, NFT has always been tainted with closure and artificial scarcity.image description

Ania Catherine and Dejha Ti, installation view, 2019

According to the description of how Sotheby’s plans to use its Decentraland address: as a “proprietary, bespoke NFT marketplace” and “a destination for NFT sales,” it’s hard to envision Metaverse as a means of liberation for artists. Closed logic is written into the fabric of the metaverse. Visitors wishing to participate in the auction will "need to create a profile and get a unique avatar created by crypto designer and digital artist Pak, who is the subject of the auction house's first NFT sale." Amid all the hype and noise, it's great to see The value of the art world will not disappear completely with the establishment of new places of value creation.

However, believers do exist. Foremost among these is the respected and savvy digital art collector Sylvain Levy, who is quite optimistic about the possibilities offered by large-scale AR projects: “In my dreams, the Metaverse is free from Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon. , which shall be an island of happiness and liberty,Internet trollsimage description

Ania Catherine and Dejha Ti, installation view, 2019

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Ania Catherine and Dejha Ti, installation view, 2019

The Chinese government-announced rival Metaverse has generated fewer headlines in Western publications than Zuckerberg’s predictions for a hipster metaworkspace, but it does represent a potentially closer and therefore more threatening claim. The combination of technology and state power has a notoriously ruthless pedigree. For every mass electrification and vaccination program, the federal death penalty or the Tuskegee Experiment looms in the (willfully forgotten) fog of history.

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Ania Catherine and Dejha Ti, installation view, 2019

However the biggest question related to the Metaverse is probably what it will run on, the idea that anything resembling a Metaverse will exist when the COP (United Nations Climate Change Conference) goal of phasing out fossil fuels expires is next to impossible . Given the speed at which signatories have been pursuing their goals, the notion of metaverse infrastructure built and maintained entirely by renewable energy is highly questionable. People Can Rest - If "Rest" Is the Right Word - Guaranteed We'll Still Be Burning When Zuckerberg Celebrates Meta's 50th Anniversary With His Staff and Staff Robots Playing His First Virtual World Hands Dinosaur bones.

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Ania Catherine and Dejha Ti, installation view, 2019

The good news, of course, is that anything Zuckerberg renders in the Metaverse may not exist, or it may exist, and not in almost anyone's lifetime right now. As Eric Ravenscraft points out, the technology has to come a long way before anyone wants to passively enjoy some of the metaverse treats we promise.

Habib William Kherbek is the author of the novels Ecology of Secrets (2013), Ultralife (2016), New Adventures (2020) and Best Practices (2021). His collection of short stories, Twenty Horror Stories of Our Techno-Feudal Tomorrow, will be released in August 2021.

Ania Catherine and Dejha Ti are an experiential artist duo based in Los Angeles and Berlin. Dubbed "two key contemporary voices on the international stage of digital art" (Clot) and "LGBT power couple" (Flaunt), they create large-scale works with a signature poetic technical approach. They have won Lumen Award, S+T+ARTS Award and ADC Award.