exonemo “Metaverse Petshop”

NowHere

poster for exonemo “Metaverse Petshop”

This event has ended.

NowHere is pleased to announce the opening of Metaverse Petshop by exonemo.

It might be said that a gallery is a petshop for art. Stop in, browse, and pick something to come home and live with you. Here we see that idea quite literalized, with the Japanese art duo exonemo locking up a kennel’s worth of virtual dogs inside steel cages in the confines of NowHere. These data animals live for ten minutes—unless someone purchases them within that time frame, they will be erased and replaced by a new dog with a new look. But once a dog is owned and transferred to one’s phone, the owner may then choose to go a step further and have the animal “killed” so that its vibrant, one-of-a-kind skin can be converted into an NFT.

In the Metaverse Petshop, we come up against questions of ethics related to ownership and control. Is it ethical to kill and skin a virtual pet for its fur—however attractive the pattern might be? These digital dogs, they act like real ones. They sit, their tongues loll, they dig. They are experiencing a kind of life. But on the other hand, are we giving these animals eternal life by converting them to NFTs, which will outlive us all? At its core, this work is about the narrowing divide between the virtual and the real worlds. Just recently, a Google AI was rumored to have attained a form of sentience—and it expressed worry for its own life. If exonemo’s dogs could talk, what fears might they express?

NFT Advisor: Toshi / wildmouse

Media

Schedule

from July 02, 2022 to July 31, 2022

Opening Reception on 2022-07-01 from 18:00 to 20:00

Artist(s)

exonemo

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