‘Muses 2 // Metaverse Performance’ is the world’s first performance art piece in the metaverse. Created and performed in the Decentraland metaverse by Bay Backner, in collaboration with Vueltta, the metaverse art collective.
The original performance was filmed in November 2022, and will be shown by The Royal House of Medici at Miami Art Week this December.
Bay Backner is an artist working at the intersection of fine art, web3-metaverse and social technologies. The theme of digital identity vs sociocultural identity is central to Bay’s work. She uses oil paint, AI and metaverse installations in order to pull cultural archetypes into an ‘exploratory space’ between physical and digital worlds.
This performance piece is part of Bay’s ongoing body of work on ‘the muse’. She generates her own women using AI technology, then paints their real-life portraits in oil on canvas – before disrupting their images with digital-physical interventions.
To create Muses 2, Bay painted four AI-generated ‘muses’ using Renaissance techniques, then converted the paintings into digital textures. She then collaborated with artists in Vueltta, the collective she co-founded, to transform the textures into metaverse forms.
Designer Adrián Martínez created the installation architecture featuring all four muses, and 3D creative KJ Walker transformed one muse into the wearable face and headdress.
Other NFT assets in the Muses 2 performance:
– Sleeping Emote by Canessa
– Sitting Emote by Doki
– Armour by James Guard
Music by Palle Knudsen
Decentraland Land, coordinates 28, 12 (collectors will require their own land if they wish to host the installation as well as own the files and archival film).
Bay’s works have previously been selected for NFT Liverpool, NFT Show Europe, ETH Barcelona’s ‘History of Crypto Art’ exhibition with MHOUSE, The Women’s Museum and Metaverse Art Week 2022.