Courtesy of Michael Hull and Times Square Arts Krista Kim, Continuum Times Square, 2022. I should mint this and ask the world whether we are ready for a metaverse lifestyle.” And I guess that question was answered. So I then said, “wow, I already have this home, that’s a 3D asset. It would, in fact, create a better world for all of us. And I could just see that NFTs would become every mode of human exchange that’s digital, that we would create digital twins, and it would become a new decentralized economy and political system. I signed up for SuperRare and was whitelisted for February. It was in December 2020 when I discovered blockchain, when I went down the rabbit hole of NFTs. Over that period, I hired a freelancer to do the 3D renderings of my sketches, integrating my artwork and video art. In March 2020, when everyone was locked down around the world, I decided to build the Mars House as my escape, my dream home, which I would actually experience in virtual reality. And I find them very healing and soothing for my eyes, for my senses, for my state of mind. So what I do is I basically gather images of LED lights, manipulating them using Adobe Suite, and I create these gradient artworks - very minimalist and visceral. And so I knew that art can be of service to humanity, which became my revelation.Ī few years later, when I moved to Singapore, I realized that I needed to create the Zen garden of the 21st century and beyond. It was in the Ryōan-ji temple garden where I realized that our environment is a mirror of the mind. Kyoto is a place where every design decision in the environment - from architecture to landscaping, cuisine to fashion - was imbued with Zen consciousness. And when I lived in Japan for three years, I would often travel from Tokyo to Kyoto, which became my favorite place in the world. I was born in Canada, but my background is Korean. Many of us don’t realize that the screen can be repurposed to create a state of Zen. And so meditation and the expression of the sublime in our environment was something that I thought would help me, so I began to create art with light, influenced by the work of Rothko and James Turrell. So I basically decided that, as someone who practices regular meditation in order to mitigate anxiety and depression, I was very sensitive to the inputs of the world on my inner sanctum. This was a disturbing realization for me. So McLuhan’s dictum that “the medium is the message” began to really make sense to me, whereby this invasive, ubiquitous technology - smartphones and social media in particular - were taking over my consciousness through relentless distraction and reinforced behaviors like dopamine hits. Back when I started out in 2013, I was getting addicted to my phone. I love his book, Understanding Media (1964), which taught me a lot about the world. Krista Kim: I am a student of Marshall McLuhan. I think sometimes when we talk about NFTs, there’s a temptation to start history over at year zero, but both of you are mindful of the histories in which you’re operating. And I am interested in the ontological shift that may or may not be taking place as we move into the metaverse. One area you both align is in the importance of digital consciousness, psychological states, and well-being to your different worlds. While Krista has commodified NFT architecture through the Mars House (2020) and envisioned a native Web3 virtual world. At least from my perspective, when I think about works by Lawrence like Geomancer (2017), there’s a kind of critical politics that underpins it all. Īlex Estorick: There’s obviously a conversation to be had here about digital architecture, including virtual worldbuilding, but also one about property relations in the metaverse. This conversation is also available as a podcast.