Jenesis - 005

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Jenesis
2021
Virtual Sculpture - Series - NFT

Joshua confronts the infinite scale of virtual worlds with Jenesis. He brings his own life, creation stories, pop culture, and world history into these contemporary cave paintings.

Mint on OpenSea All Files Interview

Genesis

"Jenesis" is a reaction to the ability to create worlds virtually, for the first time. The opportunity of limitless creation in AR, VR, or broadly speaking, the metaverse, without the constraints of gravity, material, or budgets is empowering, but overwhelming. You are placed in God's shoes, with the ability to tell any story.

The Figure

If I could really create anything virtually, I felt it was crucial to address my bodily vehicle and its physical limitations first. These limitations are the foundation of all human experiences.

How it's Made

Jenesis was created entirely in a VR headset in my bedroom. Each sculpture and its surfaces were shaped individually with no generative or reused elements.

Always on View

The finished works can be interacted with on this site, deployed in any environment with AR, and soon in VR worlds.

Collectors will be celebrated with their names appearing alongside the work as a patron in every new context. Names will be refreshed to the current holder each week.

Opensea

Jenesis is available for purchase on OpenSea.

OpenSea is the first and largest peer-to-peer marketplace for digital assets, which include collectibles, gaming items, and other virtual goods backed by a blockchain. On OpenSea, anyone can buy or sell these items through a smart contract.

View collection on Opensea

Jenesis at the Guggenheim (Video)

3D Printing

Minimal surfacing makes Jenesis easily 3D printed. Editions coming soon to patrons.

Further Reading - Augmented Reality Sculpture

If augmented reality sculpture reaches the fidelity of the real world, should we continue making physical sculpture? Perhaps. But perhaps not. From the audience's point of view, it doesn't make a difference as it usually can't be touched either way.

The case for augmented reality sculpture, if it achieves the same or close to the same fidelity as its physical counterpart, will be its ability to be shared and experienced by the most people. If art is really about communicating ideas and perspective, I believe virtual reality sculpture could become the dominant medium.

Of course, most physical sculpture relies on its materiality and construction process for context. For a while, material properties will be a major part of sculpture's grammar, but I believe it won't be important in the far future as we adopt digital representations of material to create meaning. This is the same way reading the word "wood" contains the same emotional properties of wood.

I think we will see that most sculpture today uses material ambiguously out of necessity. I think material and our access to it greatly limits our imagination to what it is immediately possible.

Unless you have the budget of Damien Hirsts or Jeff Koons, augmented reality sculpture will allow you to make equivalent form arguments at little to no material cost.

Further Reading - The Screenshot Arguement

All files for this project are made public in a Google Drive folder, acknowledging "the screenshot argument" against NFTs.

An NFT is a highly tamper-proof certificate of authenticity, not an artwork. The work can be copied, but the certificate cannot.*

Certificates are very important and function as agreements made between people existing in a system. They assure us that something is what it says it is. Certificates are not real in way that water or gravity is, but can come close if we collectively choose to agree that they are.

Ultimately, certificates are important because they encourage authorship and proper accountability. It is getting easier and easier to create fake products, deepfakes, and fake news - putting recipients in danger. Being able to keep track of what is real is more important than ever. At this time, there just happens to be no better system for creating a tamper-proof contract outside of blockchains.

*The notion of art not being the physical work itself, but the idea behind the work has long been established in the genre of conceptual art. Before blockchains, all the way back in the 1960s, artist Sol Lewitt created diagrams and instructions for building his sculpture. To him, the diagrams were the work, not the sculpture. Whomever possessed the diagrams possessed the art. NFTs can be seen as a more permanent diagram assigned to a piece of work.

Further Reading - Tokenization

The ability to assign ownership through blockchains is abstract and highly synthetic, but allows for entirely new economies that can support creativity and reward patrons at the same time. In this system, individuals are incentivized to use the most powerful tool at their disposal (the computer) to explore their humanity and expression, free of utility or translation into physical materials.

Collectors (everyone) now have the ability to invest in new forms of creativity, free of material*, to satisfy their own creative expression, but with the potential of payouts if selecting the right people to support. The existence of an economy like this, if agreed on, has the potential to incentivize a creativity boom and a redistribution of wealth to non-legacy artists and thinkers with the best ideas.

*computation requires large amounts of electricity and is not a material free system, but I see it as a better use of material than fast fashion, mass-produced decorations, and planned obsolescence where it isn't absolutely necessary. I think an embrace of technology for our individual expression and education will raise the bar for the physical world, demanding more of the objects that exist physically.

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Joshua confronts the infinite scale of virtual worlds with Jenesis. He brings his own life, creation stories, pop culture, and world history into these contemporary cave paintings.

Mint on OpenSea All Files