Build a metaverse around tokens, techism and wellness
You wake up in the winter of 2045. It’s midnight, and a 3D hologram of the sun is hovering above. Prescribed by your AI doctor, you remember it’s meant to boost your vitamin D levels and ease you into a new day of life lived online. The anticipation sets in, so it must work. After scarfing down a nutrient-dense packet of pink goo for breakfast, you mount your omnidirectional treadmill, don your full-body suit and VR helmet, and report to your job as director of education at one of the world’s greatest metaverse art museums.
While this reality is still some way off, this is the kind of contingency that futurists like Krista Kim are building.
The metaverse has come to mean different things to different digital native groups, brands and individuals. But in the minds of its creators, this fabled next iteration of the internet is beginning to take shape.
To truly understand what virtual existence has in store for us three-dimensional earthlings requires a special kind of imagination and disposition. And to envision the digitization of life itself, people like Kim must bring the concept from fiction to concrete fact.
Life makes art makes digital life
From an outsider’s perspective, it may seem that Krista Kim is living her life ten years into the future. But in reality, she is perhaps more grounded in the present than most of her contemporaries.
Founder of the Techism movement, Kim has centered his career around the concept of the digital consciousness. Speaking about the early days of her identity as an artist, Kim says her worldview was drawn inward, focused on how technology affected herself and those around her.
As an art student in 2013, Kim found herself paying attention to the revolutionary effects digital technology can have on human perception, media, social structures and communication. “Slowly but surely I had stopped writing, I was just texting and writing. So I thought, ‘Well, why am I? painting?'” Kim said in an interview with nft now.
“I thought I should start working with light. Because our screens – computers, digital interfaces on screens – communicate with us, says Kim. “I just knew I had to make art out of light. Because light is the new ink.”
Finding it inevitable to work half and half in the digital and physical realms, Kim first began her artistic journey focusing on shifting gradients, earning accolades over the years for her work with glass and Plexi. But when life began to change in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, Kim found herself on the path to a career building the metaverse.
How Krista Kim is building the future
When NFTs started bubbling up in 2021, Kim was already months into his journey discovering the unique and new ways digital creators were tokenizing their art on the blockchain. With a few of her own pieces minted on the blockchain, just a few days after Beeple’s iconic Everydays auction ended, Kim found her own shining moment with the landmark sale of her NFT, Mars House.
After Mars House closed with a winning bid of 288 ETH (around $512,000), Kim became synonymous with virtual real estate. A collection of her digital artistry and Zen philosophy, Mars House brought forth a renewed concept of digital housing, one aimed squarely at an NFT-enabled metaverse.
As Kim puts it, the sale of Mars House undeniably marked a paradigm shift into the metaverse. “It’s the first house you can experience in the metaverse in VR that was sold as an NFT. It’s the first property to integrate a metaverse component, and it’s the first artwork to is a metaverse work of art,” she told nft now.
But while the event definitely earned Kim a wealth of media coverage—not to mention lasting respect in the NFT community—outside of the Web3 space, the triumph was misunderstood by many.
“When the spotlight was on it, people didn’t quite understand what I was, or what the metaverse was… For most architects at the time, it was just a digital house. “Here’s a rendering that we create all the time for our clients, and this person just sold 3D rendering,” Kim said. But with grace, she took this in stride, interpreting criticism as confirmation that public misunderstanding came from her being “too far ahead”. By sticking to it, her true metaverse-building goals began to materialize in 2021.
As Kim developed into something of a poster child for virtual real estate and the movement toward Web3, her growing fame has expanded her versatility as a builder. With a persistent focus on techism and futurism, Kim has brought his ideas and ideals into the spotlight with him, rather than conforming to an “NFT celebrity” frame.
Furthermore, Kim’s continued capacity for innovation has helped solidify her name not only in the Web3 space, but also in the traditional art world – a familiar place for her, before the NFTs. And as a testament to her efforts, she became one of the first female artists to be welcomed into LACMA’s permanent collection via the old institution’s new acquisitions fund.
For Kim, her accomplishments helped her expand the horizons of the human experience by using NFTs as a vehicle for positive social change and healing in the metaverse. Her art continues to spread across the metaverse, and her landmark Mars House sale undoubtedly helped set off a virtual land grab. Now she is breaking new ground by harnessing the power of the metaverse for good.
“I’m going to create the first immersive wellness installations and experiences that help you breathe… You know, there’s nothing better than immersing the human brain in inspiring spaces because it’s scientifically proven that the beauty we see through art is healing,” said Kim.
“Many hospitals already prescribe museum visits to patients suffering from depression, anxiety and other mental health issues,” Kim added. “For this reason, if we can harness the power of the metaverse to really trick the brain into believing what it’s seeing, then you know, we really have the power to create beautiful, scientific healing experiences that are accessible.”
Krista Kim’s vision of the metaverse
Although many still associate Kim with the future of metaverse real estate, she is quickly becoming a beacon of positivity within the NFT space. Profits from many of her NFT ventures go directly back into projects she builds, and this surge of creation has enhanced her unique persona in the wider Web3 ecosystem.
In the near future, Kim hopes to continue her work toward a benevolent metaverse, starting with plans to create what she calls a “learn to serve” mechanism. In her upcoming platform 0.xyz, she aims to build ecosystems and digital experiences that are able to lift human potential.
“We just want to make wellness and meditativeness and healing a common practice for kids who are used to playing video games. We want to make it entertaining, so we think this is the way forward,” Kim told nft now. “Only 15 percent of the world meditates. But you know, for the rest of the world, art can actually create that calming experience, scientifically, and so that’s pretty exciting. We’re really at the forefront and cutting edge of this intersection.”
Despite the plethora of new platforms emerging from Zuckerberg’s Meta, Yuga Labs’ Otherside and more, the metaverse boils down to digital identity in the virtual space. For many, this means augmented reality, NFTs and VR headsets; but for Kim it is clear that enhancing the human experience is the most essential facet of the metaverse.
But it’s not easy to gain traction in the metaverse, even as a prominent Web3 builder. That’s why Kim’s big vision will take time to grow. And while NFTs and crypto have pushed countless into new Web3 territory, Kim continues to illustrate how real change, regardless of industry or market situation, can only happen person to person.
