**Mitchell F. Chan’s Boys of Summer (2023) is an artwork about quantification and its impact on culture. **

Taking the tripartite form of a video game, a collection of tokenized profile picture artworks, and a social marketplace performance, Boys of Summer deftly uses the great American pastime of baseball as a metaphor to explicate the increasing abstraction of our identities, dreams, and experiences as statistics. Abstraction is the process by which things start to become represented by simpler things. The work operates within the specific micro context of popular crypto communities, which are driven by a collective obsession with floor prices, engagement metrics, growth indexes, sales volume, and the accrual of capital; but is aptly nestled within a broader macro context of big data industries, where analytical software are able to quantify, objectify, and monetize—just about everything. Importantly, Boys of Summer asks expansive questions about data, and its impact on our lived experience: what does it mean when everything is reduced to numbers?

If you are your data, what are you really worth?

The Boys of Summer PFP collection consists of a series of baseball players. Each player starts out with some base performance statistics, and physical attributes—things like hair color, skin tone, and clothing. These PFPs can be displayed as a profile picture on social media, or socketed away in a crypto wallet like treasure. Ironically, the form that these artworks take echoes early 2020 criticism of NFTs as silly, collectible trinkets with arbitrary value—like baseball cards. Each PFP is like a baseball card itself, standing in for the character that it represents; however, each is only fully activated when the holder connects their wallet to the Boys of Summer video game.

The Boys of Summer video game is a web-based, interactive experience rendered in Unity and displayed directly in the player’s web browser. Brightly-colored menu screens and dynamic, cheery textures compose imagery that is both clean and shiny, yet retro-leaning and nostalgic. The adventure begins as the player hits ‘start’ on the game, and a journey through their character’s ‘life’ unfolds--from high school through college and beyond. In the quest to ‘win’ and become a professional baseball player, the player is asked to make a series of inputs about the character—their hitting frequency, swing power, and other baseball-related performance traits. Posed in the form of questions, the player must make decisions that ultimately boil down to statistical changes for the character’s profile. As the game progresses, the questions become increasingly personal—how much time should the character devote to sleep? What college should they attend, and how much debt should they accrue? The list goes on.

Ultimately, by the end of the game, the player accumulates a copious amount of information about their character. The cascading streams of numbers are unrelenting, to the point where the character becomes almost totally obscured by blocks of data. This information then updates the metadata for their PFP token, saving their gameplay and character development to the blockchain. Once saved, the updates become visible to others in the marketplace. It is only at this point that the rarity of certain traits is revealed—the inherent statistics born in each character at the time of mint become apparent after playing the game and updating a character’s metadata with learned traits. In this way, the work is a true experiment in the relationship between nature and nurture: how you play the game can impact your character's traits, but only insofar as their inherent potential allows.

In the world of crypto, traits are never just descriptive characteristics: they are also signifiers of value. Marketplaces are speculative environments where certain attributes carry more value than others. It often boils down to crowd perception: most often, perceived value is related to data associated with the token. Chan understands that current trading paradigms on today’s digital art marketplaces magnify this phenomenon by intentionally, unintentionally, and algorithmically diverting focus towards quantifiable characteristics, rather than qualifiable experiences with the digital assets in question. As tokens increase in value, so too do the data points associated with them become more desirable. This has a profound network effect that heavily influences both social and trading behavior. The entire cycle plays out in the public arena of the digital marketplace—and so too does Boys of Summer, performing on the virtual storefront as holders participate. Having lived through multiple crypto boom and bust cycles through the mass dispersion of PFP collections, Chan uses the medium of the PFP itself to reflect this cultural yet market-centric value system back onto itself.

It’s a game… because everything is gamified now.

The title of the work comes from Roger Kahn’s 1972 book of the same name, in which Kahn recounts both his own childhood growing up around baseball and the lives of famous players like Pee Wee Reese and Jackie Robinson. Heywood Hale Broun wrote for the Chicago Times that the book depicts “a world where baseball teams were the center of a love beyond the reach of intellect, and where baseball players were worshipped or hated with a fervor that made bubbles in our blood.” Sound familiar? As if Hale Broun gazes into the future, his words could just as easily describe the polarizing and illogical phenomenology of popular culture. Then, baseball could be seen as a metaphor for the national collective subconscious: a clear geiger counter for the state of culture. Chan sees the meteoric advancement of NFT, and particularly PFP, culture as the same kind of symptomatic expression of a social paradigm shift.

Baseball continues to be an uncanny analog for these phenomena. In 2003, Michael Lewis wrote Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game. The story follows Billy Beane, general manager for the Oakland Athletics, who revolutionized the sport by using new forms of rigorous statistical analysis. With these methods, the A’s were able to go toe-to-toe with larger teams operating with budgets two to three times larger. The Moneyball phenomenon had an enormous impact on sports and gaming industries. Sports today, like many things, are increasingly focused on statistical improvement and speculation. This is most clearly visible in the rise of organized fantasy sports leagues and sports gambling. In these gamified experiences of a game itself, baseball players become abstracted from themselves as bundles of statistics, quantified objects, and commodities to be traded.

Like the sport of baseball represented American life in Kahn’s Boys of Summer, it certainly seems to also represent key aspects of life today. Our current paradigm can be decoded most aptly by the primacy of data, in everything. Data, the ‘new oil’, drives our world. “You are your data,” they say. Companies and governments alike use data to quantify, analyze, monetize, and ultimately objectify us. In fact, we do it to ourselves. We are obsessed with numbers, performance, and improvement, and play fun games to quantify ourselves by counting things like steps and heart rate. We also know, if somewhat vaguely, that everything that we do becomes a data point somewhere: every click tracked, every purchase logged, every decision recorded (if not on a ledger, then somewhere in the ‘cloud’).

Society seems mostly resigned to the fact that we are all just datasets. In the complexity of our current situation, which is registered in orders of magnitude, it seems that there is widespread acceptance that the best one might hope for is to have some agency, to control just some of one’s own data. It’s like Kant’s notion of the mathematical sublime: when something is so large as to be inconceivable, it is pleasing to see it reduced to an understandable numeric logic. Indeed, ‘number go up’ can feel quite good.

The problem with quantification is abstraction.

When anything is quantified, it becomes abstracted from itself; and, in the process, reduced or diluted. Abstraction operates through representation, by representing things with different things.  In the statistical turn, data is gained, but knowledge is lost. Over time, this chisels away at what made that thing worth quantifying in the first place until it becomes something else entirely. In this process, the original thing starts to fade, and, eventually, is forgotten. Datasets are abstracted forms of people; and, as Chan suggests, in our data-driven society, people might even be replaceable. While this is nothing new, the idea of taking ownership of one’s quantified self is more novel. Some see value in knowledge; understanding data about oneself to make better decisions. Others use more tactical methods, like self-surveillance, to resist or take control of how they are quantified.

Now more than ever, it feels impossible to ignore the ways in which societal discourse, and our personal lives, have become a numbers game. To show off our value, we present ourselves as data. In the art world, speculative trading can sometimes denote value rather than the technical skill, conceptual rigor, or aesthetic beauty of a work of art. In the crypto world, we use PFPs to declare our affiliations and values. Boys of Summer reminds us that PFPs can be just another kind of data that we use to quantify ourselves. Pictures in browser come to represent our identities, but obscure much about the person behind the JPEG. In Boys of Summer, the choices that collectors make for their characters actually drive their statistical performance in the market; ultimately painting a much more detailed picture of that collector.  They say that jazz is the only true American art form: something that could only be synthesized from the lived experiences of its Black creators. Chan jokes that PFPs are the only true natively crypto art form. The Boys of Summer does indeed say a lot about who we are, and what it feels like to be an artist working in web3 today. It also poses a hopeful experiment, offering agency to write your own data.

How do we sift through our experiences in a quantified world?

Irreverent and evocative, The Boys of Summer is seductive because it is fun—even though very little baseball is actually played in the game. The real reward is seeing your PFP, your visualized data personification, and its numbers go steadily up, up, up. More than a game, the work is a simulation of the market, of the quality and nature and our lives, and of itself. The Boys of Summer is both delightful and ambivalent—we enjoy connecting with each other over concrete, definable things, even if we can’t totally forecast let alone comprehend the impacts of quantification. In the game, every action the player takes ultimately becomes a data point on the marketplace page for their token. While The Boys of Summer provides few answers, eerily lurking is the awareness that so, too, is everything about you.

But what ties these disparate projects together? While individually unique, they all do one thing with aplomb: they make reference to great artists from the contemporary fine art canon. These collections find common ground in the art of paying homage. 

This week, we reflect on this creative urge to expand on artistic explorations from the past, and what it means to create in the context of referencing or drawing interest from another artist or perspective. Our friends at jpg.space explore this idea at length in their ‘Derivatives’ Canon– and we’re excited to continue the conversation. 

Let’s dive in: 

Lost Home Worlds (2023) by Sam Hains & Kandors (1999-2011) by Mike Kelley 

Lost Home Worlds is a series of new worlds trapped inside bottles, inside rooms, inside landscapes, inside computer simulations. Like distant memories, the miniature worlds are inaccessible yet unmistakably present. Each world is an emblem of loss, hoping to serve as a reflective repository for trauma-processing. Barren, yet openly evocative, each microcosm mirrors a constantly shifting reality–one that invites externalization from the viewer’s mind. At the same time, the work operates on a frequency of meta ontology, become in and of itself another encapsulation of memory that it’s sculptural form yearns to represent.

This work makes direct reference to Kelley’s series Kandors (1999-2011), which investigates the inconsistencies between different representations of Kandor. Kandor is the mythological home city of Superman, which seems to be constantly reconfigured and reflected back upon itself through the comics themselves, media, and in the popular subconscious.. For Hains, Kandors has a deep connection to his own inquiries into the nature of authenticity in our technologically-mediated, man-made world. Expanding inwards from Kelley’s work, which seeks to understand the fragmented nature of collective memory and meaning-making on a macro level, Hains seeks understanding of how these kinds of representations resonate on an individual or personal level. Synthetic generations reveal just how much we each project our psyches on to the simulation; and, in turn, know ourselves and our histories. It’s exciting to see Hains take inspiration from Kelley’s historic multimedia series and continue to develop the conversation that Kelley started through a more personal investigation executed in generative web 3D. 

Everyday Odyssey by stupidgiant & Beeple’s Everydays practice

At the outset of his artistic journey, stupidgiant began creating daily doodles: a regimented, self-imposed challenge that was inspired by NFT legend Beeple’s Everydays. After the completion of a 40-day streak, he couldn’t help but compare his everydays to Beeple’s impressive 13-year everyday art record. Feeling unmotivated, stupidgiant decided to reach out to Beeple directly for advice. In response, Beeple challenged him to create art every day for 100 days.

Undeterred by his initial struggles, stupidgiant completed the 100-day challenge using his phone as a drawing tool, and went on to accept more and more rigorous challenges from Beeple. He has now produced more than 1200 consecutive daily art pieces. Eager to continue, StupidGiant is determined to reach a personal milestone of 10 years of everyday art.

Beeple’s prolific everyday practice has become an iconic creative stream in the world of NFT art His historic practice garnered international attention after a historic sale at Sotheby’s in 2021. While Beeple has become somewhat of a larger-than-life celebrity, it’s exciting to see his commitment to every day art-making extending to the support of emerging artists – an evolving, communal performance art practice and challenge. Stupidgiant, taking up the reigns for a new generation of young artists, understands the value of this kind of rigorous commitment and has followed suit to showcase to his peers the impact of perseverance. 

Flower Sand (2023)  by Yuma Yanagisawa  & Machine Hallucinations by Refik Anadol

Artist Refik Anadol uses data-driven machine-learning algorithms that create abstract, dream-like environments. The artist gained notoriety when his work was exhibited at MoMA in 2022. 

Much like Anadol, Yuma has actualized his work through large-scale projection mapping, touch-interactive interfaces, sculptural video display objects, and even mobile-enabled augmented reality activations. In Flower Sand, Yuma steps into this emerging style, bringing with him his obsessions with nature, and more specifically, floral or pastoral scenes. Yuma was deeply inspired by the fluid beauty that was extrapolated from code dynamics, and created a collection that aims to find the same meaning out of noisy data sets.

Though Machine Hallucinations has received mixed reviews, it has entered the stratosphere through its installation in the mainspace at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. While data processing remains opaque, it’s impossible to ignore the satisfying and mesmerizing nature of the animations, especially when installed on large digital screens and canvases in physical environments. With Wild, Yuma is able to give Flower Sands the same grand treatment, placing these sculptural works in live game environments so that users can experience the scale they deserve. This work carries forth the torch of algorithmic aesthetics, continuing a great line of creative inquiries through code-based experimentation. 

The Wild Residency: A space for collaboration & conversation 

With the Wild Residency, we’re excited to continue to make space for artists to create, engage with their influences, and make their best work yet – and, of course, continue to give credence and credit to those that have paved the way. 

Artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer has described his practice of creative experimentation with technology as being part of a much longer, much wider tradition than what his work represents alone. This is the spirit through which our Residents, who pay homage to the great contemporary artists who came before them, pick up the baton. Internet culture is inherently oriented towards a culture of re-mix, re-use, and re-master. Our Residency is a place where artists can navigate through the trickiness that this kind of work can entail. 

We hope that, by enabling emerging talent to follow their inspiration all the way, we might help to promulgate this grand tradition of creative experimentation.  

** **

We’ve been honored to collaborate with truly one-of-a-kind artists in the first two seasons of our Artist Residency, many of whom have gone on to launch collections on our platform that have shaped our understanding and definition of experiential art – together, we have continuously explored and expanded our own ideas, an ever-evolving way of thinking about this thrilling new genre, facilitated by blockchain technology.

We seek to provide a safe, dedicated space for creative collaboration, and to support that effort, we’re proud to announce the next step forward in doing just that: introducing the Wild Curatorial Board.

Deafbeef, Casey Reas, Holly Herndon & Mathew Dryhurst, Mitchell F. Chan, Nancy Baker Cahill, Harm van den Dorpel, Gabriel Massan, Maria Paula Fernández and Serwah Attafuah. These are the 10 outstanding individuals who we couldn’t be more excited to collaborate with to further Wild’s commitment to fostering and supporting talent in the field of experiential art.

The Wild Curatorial Board will play an integral role in selecting artists for our platform and identifying collections that exemplify the best in experiential art. They will evaluate and select collections from our Residency as well as identify collaborations that demonstrate the highest degree of experiential excellence, defined across meaningful interactivity, conceptual depth, and digital novelty, which will receive distinction as part of the Wild Signature.

Crucially, the board will also serve as overall creative thought partners, playing an essential role in developing the impact of experiential art across the broader cultural landscape.

They will serve as leaders within the Wild community, opening up new avenues for learning, development, and mentorship across our collaborative community of artists. They will also continue to help us to define what this field and the spatial internet is and chart new courses into unfamiliar artistic territory.

With deep expertise ranging from digital art to AI to generative art and beyond, the Wild Curatorial Board is excited to reveal their first selections to receive the Wild Signature status on our platform in the coming weeks – stay tuned!

Learn more about each of our members:

Deafbeef

Deafbeef is an artist and engineer based in Toronto, Canada. Over the past 20 years, he has been tinkering in diverse areas overlapping art and technology, including music, sound recording, computer animation, blacksmithing, and generative art. He received his BASc in electrical engineering and MSc from the University of Toronto, where he contributed to internationally recognized research in the field of computer animation. As a classically trained musician with a strong background in sound technology, he brings together all his interests in a bespoke art practice, using low-level computer code and a minimal toolset to craft raw information into audiovisual artworks. His recent generative works adopting blockchain technology as both subject and medium have gained wide attention.

According to Deafbeef, “It’s a great honor to support Wild’s mission to propel collectors and creators alike to experiment with, and create, a new frontier for immersive digital art. I’m also so excited to contribute and learn from the other esteemed members of Wild’s Curatorial Board.”

Casey Reas

Casey Reas is an American artist whose software, prints, and installations have been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions at institutions and galleries around the world. Reas is best known for having created, with Ben Fry, the Processing programming language. He is a professor at UCLA and a co-founder of Feral File. Born in Troy, Ohio, he studied design at the University of Cincinnati, and he later earned a Master’s in Media Arts and Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's MIT Media Lab.

Casey Reas explains, “I’m delighted to join Wild’s Curatorial Board, alongside many incredible artists and sources of inspiration in the space. Together, we’ll support contemporary artists who redefine boundaries, reset expectations, and defy tradition.”

Holly Herndon and Mathew Dryhurst

Holly Herndon & Mathew Dryhurst are artists renowned for their pioneering work in machine learning, software and music. They develop their own technology, and protocols for living with the technology of others, often with a focus on the ownership and augmentation of digital identity and voice. These technical systems not only facilitate expansive artworks across media, but are proposed as artworks unto themselves. They were awarded the 2022 Ars Electronica STARTS prize for digital art. They have sat on ArtReview’s Power 100 list since 2021. Holly holds a Ph.D in Computer Music from Stanford CCRMA, Mathew is largely self taught. They have held faculty positions at NYU, the European Graduate School, Strelka Institute and the Antikythera Program at the Berggruen Institute. They publish their studio research openly through the Interdependence podcast, and recently co-founded Spawning, an organization building a consent layer for AI. Their critically acclaimed musical works are released through 4AD.

According to Holly Herndon and Mathew Dryhurst, “As passionate believers in the intersection of art, AI and innovation, we’re honored to serve as Advisors to Wild from the earliest days of dreaming up what could be. Now we are putting these dreams into action. We’re delighted to team up with an incredible group of creative thought leaders, building an interdisciplinary and artist-first approach to discovering and defining a bold new world for all of us.”

Mitchell F Chan

Mitchell F Chan is a Toronto-based conceptual and public artist. He is perhaps best known for creating “Digital Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility” in 2017, which was one of the first major NFT art projects. His works explore the ways that humans navigate the world around them and how technology and social structures affect our behavior. He is interested in themes of ownership and commodification of art. His work has been covered and discussed in numerous media outlets, including Artforum, Art In America, VICE, Canadian Art, Slate, the Toronto Star, and Gizmodo.

Mitchell F Chan remarks, “It’s been a great privilege to be on the Wild journey from its earliest days as a Mentor in the Residency to now serving on this impressive Curatorial Board with colleagues and friends from across the industry. Together we are defining a new genre of bleeding-edge art and I’m excited to play a part.”

Nancy Baker Cahil

Nancy Baker Cahill is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist whose hybrid practice focuses on systemic power, consciousness, and the human body. She works in augmented reality and virtual reality, drawing and video, among other media.  Her monumental augmented reality (AR) artworks extend and subvert the lineage of land art, often highlighting the climate crisis, civics, and a desire for more equitable futures. She is the Founder and Artistic Director of 4th Wall, a free, AR public art platform exploring site interventions, resistance, and inclusive creative expression. She recently gained national acclaim for installing an exploding uterus in AR above the US Supreme Court, in response to the evisceration of abortion rights in the US.

According to Nancy Baker Cahill, “Experiential art as a medium coupled with critical social issues has long been a personal focus of mine. I’m honored to join my fellow Wild Curatorial Board members to support artists who push boundaries, take risks, and create a future not yet imagined.”

Harm van den Dorpel

Driven by a deep interest in the philosophy of technology, Harm van den Dorpel’s work transcends the medium and has pushed the art world forward in the appreciation of digital art. One of the first artists to create and sell on-chain artwork in 2015, well before the advent of NFTs as we know them today, Harm challenges us to understand and interrogate the systems we exist within. Over the past two decades, he has pushed the limits of what’s possible with generative art, creating pieces that explore concepts of randomness, creative control, language, and art. His internet-based art gallery left.gallery was a pioneering space that was one of the first in the world to sell digitally editioned, code-based artworks.

Harm van den Dorpel notes, “As an early adopter of making art on the blockchain, it’s been fantastic to see the explosion of this new dimension. I’ve enjoyed serving as a Mentor in Wild’s Residency and am eager to expand my impact as a member of the Curatorial Board as we seek to support and celebrate even more artists who are experimenting with the unknown.”

Gabriel Massan

Gabriel Massan (from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) is a Berlin-based multidisciplinary visual and digital artist. Combining storytelling and worldbuilding, Massan creates worlds that simulate and narrate situations of inequality within the Latin American experience. Across 3D animation, digital sculpture, gamification, sound, and interactive installations, the artist investigates themes around subversive otherness and fictional archaeology concerning the imagination of a 'Third World.' Gabriel has been recognized by ETOPIA - Center for Art & Technology, the  Instituto Moreira Salles, Dazed as part of the Dazed 100, Serpentine Galleries, the Bangkok Biennale Online Pavillion,The Photographers' Gallery, and X Museum. Recent and upcoming group exhibitions include: 'WORLDBUILDING: Gaming and Art in the Digital Age' (Julia Stoschek Collection, 2022; Centre Pompidou-Metz, 2023); 'Canon!' (Frieze No.9 Cork Street, 2022) and 'Possible Agreements' (Mendes Wood DM, 2022)."

"It's a great honor to join Wild's Curatorial Board alongside artists and leaders I've long admired. I'm a great believer in Wild's position as a facilitator of encounters between creative potentials and their dedication to maximizing the impact of these connections by providing innovative and novel tools. Through Wild's Residency, I've enjoyed the benefits of collaborating alongside impressive artists across the globe, and I'm excited to celebrate and propel their collections forward," remarks Gabriel Massan.

Maria Paula Fernández

Maria Paula Fernández is the Co-Founder of jpg.space and the Department of Decentralisation. She has been working in Web3 since 2017, having worked for several of the most prominent blockchain projects, including Polkadot, Gnosis, Melonport, Ethereum Community Fund, Golem, Akropolis, Concourse Open, Avalanche, and other grassroots and established projects on the Ethereum ecosystem. In 2018 she founded the Department of Decentralisation, hosting Web3 hackathons and researching, publishing and curating at the intersection of art and technology. Currently she’s focused at jpg.space on building web3 cultural infrastructure. She is from Buenos Aires and lives in Berlin.

As Maria Paula Fernández notes, "Joining Wild's Curatorial Board presents a unique opportunity to collaborate with incredible minds who are pushing the envelope to create awareness and find new ways to bring to light cultural value in web3. I believe this will be the north star of this burgeoning industry."

Serwah Attafuah

Serwah Attafuah is a multidisciplinary artist and musician based on Dharug land/West Sydney, Australia. She creates surreal cyber dreamscapes and heavenly wastelands, populated by afro-futuristic abstractions of self with strong ancestral and contemporary themes.

Serwah has collaborated and been commissioned by clients including Mercedes Benz, Nike, GQ, Adobe, Paris Hilton and Charli XCX. Recent notable achievements include her participation in Sotheby's 'Natively Digital': A Curated NFT auction and 'Apotheosis': a live motion capture experience with Soft Centre at The Sydney Opera House.

Serwah Attafuah explains, “As an enthusiastic artist in Wild’s Residency, I’ve seen firsthand the power and impact that a team of champions can have. Building and releasing a collection can be both lonely and vulnerable, and it’s heartening to have a network who believes in our visions, our ambitions, and pushes us to dream beyond our comfort zones. ”

Sharing an update that I hope you’ll find exciting. Starting next Monday May 1, we’re pausing our daily Oasis auctions, and will spend more time focusing on the collectors already in our corner - YOU, the earliest members of our most intimate, impressive, and important community.

Oasis community: It’s building season. Yes, you’re early. 

In the fall of 2022, we emerged from the wild with the launch of Oasis - our debut digital art collection, and foray into the world of experiential art. In just over four months, we’ve welcomed 400+ Oasis holders who have collected incredible experiential art. As we grow Oasis to its eventual 1,000 supply count, our top priority is to cultivate this community thoughtfully and intentionally. Our plan is - and has always been - to focus on creating outsized value for our passionate Oasis holders. Time is on our side.

What this means for you.

Great news, you’re early, you’re first, and you’ll forever be an integral part of the Wild family. This means you’ll still have exclusive early access to our artist releases (some epic drops on deck!), and also a chance to connect with us on a deep and personal level. We want to know what matters most to you and how we can make the Oasis experience valuable, engaging and dynamic.

Big things are coming… 

Our team has been traveling the globe to meet with hundreds of artists. We have exciting initiatives in the works that will expand the Wild platform and introduce new opportunities to enhance the Oasis experience. Trust us, it’s not-to-be-missed. Hint: Big things are coming from legendary artists, who you might already know and love… We can’t wait to share more soon! 👀

Got friends sitting on the sidelines, or eager to scoop one more?

There’s just a week left to get in on the action for now. If you plan to place a bid, now is the time.

Ready to learn more??

I’m hosting a Town Hall, Tuesday May 9 at 12pm PT. RSVP to get an update on all things Wild. Also, please grab 1:1 time with our Collector Experiences Lead, Jonathan Colon here.

As always, we so appreciate your ongoing belief, support and commitment to the creators at the bleeding edge of experiential art. We’re building something special, and in no small part thanks to each and every one of you.

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From the first interactive multi-user dungeons, to the interactive net.art of the 90s, all the way up through the post-internet experiments of the aughts and into our current Web3 era—experiential art has come in many forms. Obviously, this is a dramatic understatement. For decades, artists have built expansive, interactive worlds that convey rich conceptual meaning and provide exciting, immersive experiences for the viewer. Wild is committed to shaping a landscape for experiential art to thrive and find its home.

Up until now, the global platform for so-called experiential art has been largely obscure. Hard to find and often difficult to access, experiential art has sprouted up mostly in underground and DIY venues, esoteric internet spaces, niche online communities, and entertainment industry events. Typically, artists had little recourse to express this work outside of a select few under-resourced galleries and public institutions, or their own self-created publishing channels. There was no unifying resource for cultivating, supporting, discovering, or otherwise rooting an experiential art market, and no place for artists to go to share that work in a native context.

Thanks to innovations in web 3D, software that interacts with the blockchain, and other improved internet infrastructure, experiential art is now accessible to the average internet user—in places around the globe, across chasms of the digital divide. For the first time, cryptographic technologies are facilitating not only the sale of artworks that fit under the experiential art umbrella but are also enabling artists to create dynamic functionality and establish true provenance. Popular adoption of the blockchain creates a shared community whereby values of trust and mechanisms for connection are baked in. Web3 is the missing piece, the key that unlocks experiential art and opens the doors to near-limitless possibilities for creators.

We think about experiential art in three ways:

1. Interactivity: Does the artwork invite the viewer to actively engage with or influence it or transport the viewer to a different space or mindset? Does the work change over time, or evolve in some way? Does the viewer take an active, rather than passive, role in relationship to the work?

https://opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0x98aDc78A822e38c44894A0Cd04201a270818970a/23

2. Digital Novelty: Does the artwork incorporate multiple forms of media or use unique spatial relationships to create a specific atmosphere, mood, feeling, or effect? Does the work demonstrate excellent or novel use of a specific technology or technical process?

https://opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0x71Ac18732f1eE45629C1e723E9b0807C517a777d/128

3. Conceptual Depth: Does the artwork show a commitment to a creative rigor around a unique concept or perspective? Does the work demonstrate a critical viewpoint or investigation? Has the artist engaged in an interdisciplinary approach that breaks down binary or static conceptions of art? Are they in dialogue with a wider community or a longer tradition of creative inquiry?

https://opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0xFc9E28dD33FFa66dEB6F7f90c3b6e7F300726C55/72

Of course, this is an intentionally general rubric: these criteria are meant to evolve with experimentation and based on the needs of the community. As we continue to explore, make discoveries, and define this burgeoning field, these guideposts will shift, adapt, and some might even transform completely. And we believe that NFTs—really blockchain-enabled technologies in general—will be the vehicle that empowers artists to embark on those explorations.

But why Experiential Art? And why now?

Let’s think about the most familiar kinds of virtual experiences: video games. More than half of the adult population in the United States plays video games. This is staggering, because quantifying participation in this way demonstrates a public investment in experiential online space. It indicates that the worlds of 3D, software-based, and interactive artwork—worlds that were seemingly illegible to the general public—might not actually be so alien. These familiar experiences create a substrate for dynamic, interactive, and spatial digital artwork to attach to. It is even now being suggested that time spent in game space actually improves cognitive development. Really, experiential art is produced as part of a visual and cultural lexicon that is increasingly native to our society. The logic of the ‘metaverse' is no longer relegated to cyber subculture: it is a language of our shared world that has a marked impact on the way we think.

Speaking to that shared world, at Wild, we believe that the future of the internet is a spatial one. We’re leaving behind the days of endless doom-scrolling in 2D point-and-click environments; and moving into an internet that is multi-dimensional, open, and exploratory, where movement, embodiment, and sociality take center stage. We spend so much of our days online—kids ages 8-18 spend 7.5 hours per day on screens for fun (not including time spent online for school or work). Our challenge is to create a shared Web3 world where that time is spent forging rich connections through meaningful online community rooted in stirring art experiences.

And truly, it is a challenge. We’re working at the bleeding edge of a whole host of different technologies. 3D environments on the web are burgeoning and often still face bandwidth and hardware limitations on the user side. There is still an element of friction in navigating between online spaces. Moreover, interactive and dynamic works that change over time based on blockchain functionality are brand new; artists are writing code and implementing their ideas in real-time, and in many cases, for the first time. We don’t have longterm use cases, or worst-case scenario preparedness guides available yet. Things might break, get lost, or not work as they were intended.

Of course, these speed bumps are to be expected. There will be growing pains as artists continue to come to grips with the possibilities that Web3 technologies enable. This is going to be an incremental process, one in which small innovations and best practices snowball, getting better and better over time. We need an ecosystem that incubates that kind of intentional development. Together, we hope to support and develop a growing body of distinctive experiences that coalesce in a future-oriented toward active, enriching, and energizing online life.

Creating and collecting art should not be a unilateral function, gate kept by institutional forces; instead, ideas and feelings should flow in all directions, with access and openness at a foundational community level. Moreover, encounters with digital art should not be static or flattened, but rather as multi-dimensional and expansive as possible. Artists need frameworks, tools, and support to critically engage with the field at a high level. By creating a home for experiential art, we are creating a hub whereby relationships can break down antiquated notions of what art experiences, art markets, and art community, can be.

Take a walk on the Wild side with us. We’re planting the seeds of a new ecosystem that is rooted in shared experiences. Over the next few months, we’ll be compiling a compendium of experiential art built out from conversations that we are having with the other groundbreakers forging ahead. We can’t do it alone: but together, through our shared values and efforts, we can build a future for experiential art beyond your wildest imagination.

San Francisco, CA – March 9, 2023 – Wildxyz, a hyper-curated experiential art platform for artists and collectors, has raised a $7M seed funding round, led by Matrix Partners and joined by notable investors and advisors from top tier venture capitalists and well-known figures in Silicon Valley, Web3, and Hollywood, including Founder of LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman; COO & CFO at Google’s X, the moonshot factory, Helen Riley; CEO & Founder, Metatheory and former founder of Twitch, Kevin Lin; President of the Philadelphia 76ers, Daryl Morey; Oculus co-founder Nate Mitchell; Crypto and NFT Investor, Cozomo de Medici; and more. In addition to its dynamic portfolio of investors, Wildxyz is advised by NFT artist Emily Yang (pplpleasr), Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst, and celebrated NFT collector, JDH.

Awed by the caliber of artists producing inspiring digital art, Wild founder and CEO, J. Douglass Kobs, most recently CEO and founder of Apartment List, noticed an increasing need for makers to be better supported and a way for fans and collectors to form deeper connections with artists via virtual experiences and built-in collaborations.

"Web3 is upon us and here to stay. We believe the future of the internet is spatial, and people are going to spend more and more of their time in immersive, digital spaces,” said Douglass. “The world's best experiences - online and offline - are created by artists, so we wanted to build a more creative, trusted platform where global makers can showcase immersive art that will transform how we spend our time online.”

Wild is a platform for progressing creative expression, building a trusted network of artists and collectors with access to the Wild ecosystem that includes an artist residency and a curated destination for immersive art and propriety drops.

Wild’s Artist Residency

Wild’s Artist in Residency is a virtual program that helps catapult artists to the cutting edge of digital creativity where they’ll build the future of ‘the spacial internet’— where collectors and artists will create and experience art in immersive, ever-evolving virtual settings. Artists from varying disciplines and geographies are handpicked by Wild and paired with advisors for a 12-week program dedicated to mentorship, storytelling, and community building. At the end of each program, artists release original collections exclusively on Wild. Wild artists take NFTs beyond their static 2D form and bring both the artwork and minting experience to life through multimedia elements, positioning each piece as part of a larger story and introducing new concepts around user agency where artworks evolve through holder participation.

Wild is the only platform that combines an artist residency program with an exclusive marketplace and built in collector base, positioning Wild as the first-of-its-kind launch pad for artists at the nexus of digital art and web3. Wild debuted its inaugural Season 0 drops on January 23. The Season 0 artist cohort includes several renowned artists as well as emerging talent, including Hideo, Mitchel F. Chan, Aluna, Sasha Belitskaja, Auguste Wibo and more. To date, all four of Wild’s Season 0 artist releases have sold out and collectors have minted over 675 NFT artworks across all collections— Hideo’s “quasar fighter”, “Freaky Flowers” by Jeffrey Scudder, “Common Spaces” by Sasha Belitskaja sold 100 pieces, and Wild’s latest generative art release, “Machines” by Caleb Ogg, which overnight reached a cumulative total of 38 ETH on secondary markets. Wild will host the remaining Season 0 artist releases over the next months before launching artworks from its next cohort.

“The Wild Residency is an incredible opportunity for artists to share creativity, ideas, and energy,” said Mitchell F. Chan. “The program has created meaningful connections in my art practice that will continue to shape my career.”

Wild Oasis

Wild's weekly artist releases are available to the public via auction, but holders of a Wild Oasis, its 1,000 NFT membership collective, get early access, set mint prices, and ongoing perks as Wild expands its digital experiences. Since its launch in November of 2022, Wild has hosted daily sold out auctions for Wild Oasis, where bids start at .1ETH.

In the coming months, Wild will continue to release Season 0 collections, introduce Season 1 artists, welcome new collectors through Wild Oasis, and expand offerings on the Wild platform. As the NFT ecosystem prepares for the next cycle of growth, Wild is creating best in class experiences for artists and collectors through a multi-dimensional platform that brings boundary-pushing art to audiences across the globe.

About Wildxyz

Founded in 2022, Wild is building a home for experiential art through an artist residency, reinvented collection drops, and immersive digital experiences in service of pioneering the spatial internet. Wild partners with genre-bending and progressive artists to design the world their work comes to life in and push the boundaries on how fans can experience it.

When we set out to build Wild, we always knew we wanted to create an opportunity for a limited number of early supporters to join us and to gain access to a world that we would be able to update perpetually, evolve, and through which we could introduce ongoing rewards and new technologies as we build this futureverse together. 

As an early-stage startup with less than 10 employees, we had an ambitious vision to set a tone with this first collection. There were certainly easier paths to take -- we could have designed 1,000 2D passes, all with the same colors, patterns, textures. But we don’t believe the future will be built by doing what’s easy. It will be by taking the road less traveled and expanding our horizons. 

Thus, the Oasis was born. A symbolic representation of where we’re headed and a piece of the puzzle of the web of creativity we intend to weave. 

But we’re also not precious. We are technologist artists, and we believe the simultaneous beauty of what we’re building is that everything contains permanence, and yet nothing is finite. Today you’re jumping into a 3D world on a browser or phone through a webstream, but we have the power to change that. To grow it, to expand it, and to allow new experiences to emerge as the technology expands with us-- and your input will help guide how we do that.

Experiences you can access in the Oasis today:

If you’ve ventured into the Oasis, you may have discovered some hidden gems… But if you’ve yet to explore, here are some special hints to help you get the most out of your time in our very special world:

• The sun will come out tomorrow… Or today if you can find this secret.

• Make it rain! This secret lever will change the world around you.

• Mystical mushrooms that make it glow - need we say more?

These were some of our favorite experiences to create because it reminds us and represents the best parts of being able to create virtual experiences -- making things happen that might not otherwise in our physical world. You want the environment around you to glow at a moment’s notice? Well, in the Oasis, you can.

So what is the purpose of the Oasis, you ask? Possibility.

We’re just getting started. Will you join us? Auctions daily, 12pm PST at wild.xyz/oasis

On November 30, 2022, Wild, a residency for genre-bending artists and a destination for collecting original digital creations, announced its debut with the inaugural collection, our Wild Oasis - a founder’s pass like never before - auctioned once daily, every day.

The Oasis is your backstage pass to the Wild ecosystem, serving as the foundation for all future immersive virtual experiences, which will expand over time.

Oasis Benefits

We’re delighted to offer some early benefits of the Oasis. This is just the beginning -- initial perks include:

• Access to allowlist for artist drops (first come, first served)

• Allowlist for Wild design lab drops

• And, most importantly, an ongoing destination that will surprise and delight

Oasis Supply

The public auctions started with lucky #301, with the initial 300 shared with our Artists in Residency (including Mitchell F Chan, Harm van den Dorpel, Aluna, Hideo, Yinkore, Sasha Belitskaja, Andre Oshea), Advisors (including Holly Herndon, Mat Dryhurst, Desiree Gruber, pplpleasr, JDH), early investors and champions (including Andy Artz, j1mmy.eth, Cozomo, Daryl Morey, Akash Arg) and our founding team. Pre-seed investors received one Oasis per $10,000 investment, and seed investors received one Oasis per $25,000 investment. Those who invested more than $50,000 in our seed round received multiple Oasis passes aligned to the size of their investment in Wild.

Check out a few of the faces of the early Wild Oasis community below. We’re excited to kick this off with a world-class community of artists and collectors alike and eager for new friends to join in the fun.

Celebrating our first collector!

A massive shoutout to our first bidder, who also became our first auction winner, StiltTrades - clearing the bid with 2.8ETH on December 1.

Additional key information - Oasis supply overview:

• 1,000 total

• 285 distributed to early Wild champions - artists, advisors, investors, and founding team

• 615 available via public auction to build our incredible Wild community!

• 100 set aside for use by Wild, including for future advisors, artists, employees and more

We’re excited to continue to seek input and share updates with all of you.

Good news! Everyone is welcome to participate - visit the Oasis daily auction, starting (and culminating!) every day at 12pm PT.

About Wildxyz

Founded in 2022, Wild is building a home for limitless creativity through an artist residency, reinvented collection drops, and immersive digital experiences. Wild partners with genre-bending and progressive artists to design the world their work comes to life in and push the boundaries on how fans can experience it.

Questions?

Questions? We’re here to help. Feel free to message us on Twitter.