Last week, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, sorry … Meta, announced his Metaverse initiative. It is an interesting experiment in the course of humanity. I have great doubts on the short term, but I do believe it might happen in the long run. If it would succeed, it would be a major collective step towards trans-humanism (whatever you think of that).

It inspired me to something that I would like to call “The Artiverse“. Of course, I am not the first to use this word. Yet, I think, my use of it is quite different.

To me, The Artiverse is an artwork in its own right, and as such, part of my Blank Slate art project. The Artiverse will express how much art, artworks and artists are connected and interrelated, inspired by each other: there is no blank slate in art, we all stand on the shoulders of giants!

The Artiverse immersively expresses “the artistic continuum” that art really is.

And by the way, wouldn’t it be great to add taste, smell or touch as well! Wow, so that you could actually smell the oil paint or feel the texture of a sculpture!

The Artiverse

To me, The Artiverse (www.artiverse.art) would be a virtual space where artworks and artists are listed in one consistent whole in a continuum along the dimensions:

• Time – A chronological timescale from the caveman up to today
• Style – A continuum in style characteristics, eg. type, scale, color, form, texture
• Goal – A continuum in purpose and philosophical meaning, art school

It could be realized by scraping the web for visual, auditive and textual information on art, and using these data as input for AI clustering and classification algorithms. Then eg. using the clustered and classified data to be represented in video, image and audio to present art, artworks and artists in a logical context. Next, a regression algorithm can be used to predict the next developments in art.

For example, you could then interact with an avatar of, let’s say, Rembrandt or Picasso, with whom you could have a virtual conversation about their art. Or maybe, you could even be part of – a digital recreation of – the actual event of creation of an artwork, in a digital copy of the studio of the artist. And it would be easy to switch seamlessly to related artists. Or you could watch a digital copy of an artwork, commented or explained by the avatar of the artist and get recommendations of similar artworks, that you may like.

We’ll see

So, I don’t know. It’s just a thought. I do not know, whether I will ever have the time, money and (technical) team to really execute these ideas.

So, if you think this is a good idea, please feel free to start a fund raising action for The Artiverse. Let me know!