We are excited to showcase two more ingenious platforms that found themselves on the DIIA Longlist! Big projects that are pushing the boundaries between art & tech and providing artists, collectors and poets with a platform that allows for revolutionary creations. Have you heard of poetry collectors before?! What about Immersive poetic experiences?! Read on to find out all about these exciting conceptions! We’re starting with our domain adopter, Snark.art! Welcome.

Snark.art

Snark.art platform screenshot

Snark.art is a company that explores the limits of blockchain technologies by collaborating with artists on the production of complex projects. By doing so, the purchase of an artwork on Snark.art becomes not only an acquisition, but the beginning of a sophisticated and poetic experience! How? Calling themselves a ‘technology laboratory’ and exploring creative and commercial possibilities in art based on the Google Cloud Platform, Snark.Art encourages artists’ growth beginning with ‘organic’ collaborations which transform into  complex, multi-layered projects which can be displayed in physical form. The best example of such work is their ‘Crystal Reef’ project. 

This project is the end-result of an organic input of digital art. To arrive at its final stage, artists had to merge their Snark.Art fostered ‘Crystals’ together, whcih are completely individualized 3D NFT collectibles algorithmically generated. These Crystals by themselves had gained international traction after they were exhibited at the Hermitage, the largest museum in the world, leading them to become one of the top-5 art projects on OpenSea. But everytime the unique ‘crystal’ was re-sold, it grew and transformed into a bigger amalgamation which resulted in – The Crystal Reef – a massive physical sculpture containing a collection of 10,301 unique Crystals shown in museums worldwide. 

This collection inspired an even more ambitious and large-scale art project of Snark.Art — The Organic Growth Art platform. This platform will serve as a new place for carefully curated collections of dynamic generative art using the same innovational dynamic NFT technology that was implemented in the Crystal Reef project. On this Art Platform, Snark.Art is planning on launching a new project with one to several thousand collectible elements every month. 

Their project is gaining the support of many creative and passionate artists from the crypto and traditional art worlds, garnering a community consisting of as many as 60K people on their discord, and 11K on twitter (3,6K Crystal holders). 

Snark.Art believes artistic experimentation on their art platform can spur innovation and engagement with blockchain, aiming to reach a wide array of audiences that perhaps do not yet fully understand the technology. This project is gaining wide traction and we can’t wait to see how many more people join Snark.art to create even bigger artworks. How Exciting! 

But don’t leave us just yet, because next up on the DIIA Longlist we have theVERSEverse

theVERSEverse

TheVERSEverse platform screenshot

There are two popular connotations or meanings we associate with the word ‘verse’ today; the first is the one speakers of the English language are already familiar with, and which the Oxford dictionary defines as: “writing that is arranged in short lines with a regular rhythm; as in poetry”, while the second connotation is found in the mounting digital meta-world and ecosystem named The MetaVerse. TheVERSEverse is a solid and creative example of the way these two merge, and how Art & Tech are colliding in more than one way.  

So, without further ado, welcome to theVERSEverse, where “text is art, poetry is technology, and language has no limits”. For the VERSEverse, the artistic importance of poetry is put to the front, and they are convinced and dedicated to the conception of poetry’s place in the world as a vital, ancient human technology invented to preserve and transmit our species’ most valuable information – be it our stories, our emotions, our histories, or/and our beliefs. 

From the verse of the literary to the VERSE of the digital, poetry has now way to evolve and expand  into the future at the same pace humans do. For this company, the way to ensure this transitory experience is by empowering poets and writers to publish cross-media poems as 3D videos, to empower them to publish media-rich spoken word, NFTs, AR filters or even collaborative, community-authored projects on their website. Their website currently operates as a storefront, linking users to existing platforms where their artworks are minted whilst always respecting the wishes of artists and poets in determining these choices.

The VERSEverse also promotes a plethora of hybrid, cross-media poetics that allow verses to flow freely between the physical, the digital and the virtual, just as we humans do on a daily basis. IRL events therefore, which enable people to touch, feel, sense, and fully experience poetry’s revelatory power, are essential to their goals. These exhibitions have seen light of day in multiple locations. Examples include a curated exhibition at the Digital Francisco Carollinum, the metaverse home of the museum that hosted the historic Proof of Art exhibition in 2021, a curation of selected artworks for Digital Art Month organized by CADAF, and a presentation of an NFT at NFT CON Miami, Consensus, NFT NYC and Proof of People.

The future looks bright for theVERSEverse and they’re planning on it! Their upcoming projects include a presentation of a selection of poetic objects at Avant Galerie in Paris in Fall of 2022, a creation of an immersively poetic experience for Miami Art Basel in collaboration with Refraction DAO, and the creation of a traveling exhibition in collaboration with the curatorial team at Studio as We Are that will be pitched internationally. 

Amazing!

And like this, we come to the end of our Longlist features. We want to wish the best of luck to all our nominees for the DIIA, and we are looking forward to seeing which companies and projects  make it to the shortlist which will be announced in September. Thank You and Stay Tuned!