How Is Web3 Revolutionizing the Art World? – with VESA | S3 E46

Vesa: 1:09

What the art world doesn't yet understand is how much of a technological evolution has already rammed through the gates of what it was for a few decades before and what is now possible. And it's the same for the artists. The artists don't yet understand the amount of opportunity that they have.

Joeri: 1:25

Everyone and welcome to the Web3 CMO Stories podcast. My name is Joeri Billast and I'm your podcast host, and today I'm stoked to be joined by Vesa. Vesa, how are you?

Vesa: 1:38

Fantastic, thank you. It's been a really nice day today here in Snowy Helsinki for a while. The white sand of Dubai keeps changing in between the white snow of Finland and then something that is quite a lot more hot on the other side of the spectrum, and it's a lot of snow. There's a park next to me, there's a bunch of kids go sledding down with their sort of snowboards and sledges and whatever, and they're making a bunch of noise and having fun. So it's a nice atmosphere.

Joeri: 2:13

No, we met in Dubai. And obviously at that moment it was really hot over there, I think 40 degrees Celsius or something like that. And now you look behind my back there is also snow in Belgium. All traffic jams today, like 10, 15 centimeters of snow. So yeah, it's a big difference Sounds familiar.

Vesa: 2:28

We just made an art Tesla with this guy called Frank and collaboration with Asvoria, the spatial web and Metaverse guys, and we made a very tropical colored Tesla Model 3 that is now blasting the streets of Denmark no, sorry, belgium. So yeah, so it's something of mine is driving in the streets of your home country, which I'm very proud of.

Joeri: 2:53

Okay, amazing. And now people, probably Vesa. They are curious Maybe they know you, maybe they don't for people that don't know you. So, guys, Vesa Kivinen. He's a multi- award winning digital art pioneer for 15 years. He's among the first five artists to start making crypto art and NFTs in 2017. He is considered to be a leading artist in Web 3 Fine Art sorry, Web 3 Fine Art Rallam winning the NFT Artist of the Year in 2023. Top Web 3 Artist Award from I think it's official Arabia that I pronounce it and World NFT Artist Award in Korea also, and both of them were in in 2022. His last museum show was at the Museum of Future in Dubai. Yes, Vesa, I'm really excited to have you on the show because 2017, it's already a long time in Web 3 and NFTs and certainly also in art. So, for our listeners, tell us a bit. Can you share your journey in the world of digital art and what inspired you to merge with blockchain technology?

Vesa: 4:06

I'll try and condense it best that I can, but the story really starts with me as a five year old white boy from out north that starts to resonate with Michael Jackson and James Brown and I turned my parents pots and pans into a drum kit and something was coming through me. And that's really how it all started and I went by the root of first thinking that I was going to be in bands and do the whole rock star route. That was very appealing to me at the time, but my more conservative parents were able to convince me that if I was to make a real career out of this, I should at the very least know music theory, and that just wasn't something that I was too interested in. I did end up going into film school and because in that I was really interested in the philosophy and the theory side as well as the actual making of films, and I ended up in a film school in the UK and started a production company. I worked in that for a long time making documentaries, television series, corporate promos, music videos, all kinds of things. And then I got this crazy idea that what if I started body painting on people and photographing that process and painting and photographing the paintings and then putting it together with Photoshop, and this is 15 years ago. So I ended up with what looks like oil paintings but actual digital files as the originals. So in essence, I would say that my whole career I came into film just at the juxtaposition, when digital cameras really started to be a thing and also digital editing started to be a thing. So my whole career, pretty much as a creative and especially as an adult, has been in the digital realm more than in the analog way, even though I was right at the cusp of it when I started coming of age and it was very difficult for me to make a living as someone who was then considered.

Vesa: 5:51

People still are ambiguous about whether I'm a digital artist or a physical artist or a fidgetle or whatever that. All these words are essentially meaningless to the point of what was just. The thing in front of me was that people considered my works to be copies as opposed to originals, because people didn't value the digital original at the time. So that was part of the fuel that I needed this technology 10 years before it was available, meaning NFTs to authenticate the digital originals and kind of play about with digital ownership.

Vesa: 6:24

So, and I also had a background in understanding how the monetary system works from a more, I would say, an activist point of view, having watched some documentaries about the central banking system and fractional the whole conglomerate, because most of the time, people really know, even on a professional level, of what money does, but they don't necessarily know what money is and how it comes into existence. And, of course, I didn't have any degree in it, I didn't study it from that way, but I started talking to economists and I started talking to a bunch of different people about it and it led me to understand that the system that we now have needs an improvement, it needs an evolution and, at the same time as I jumped into this art thing, bitcoin was born, so 2008. And I just wasn't aware of it for a long time before. So in 2017, finally, I went for a coffee with a friend of mine who said that, by the way, I'm a Bitcoin investor and I have been in that for a year and I did very well last year, and I've been trying to find an artwork about my world for a long time now online and I can't find anything of quality and, as I know that you are interested in this kind of a thing and I think you should really look into this and you showed me some under a centenopolis interviews.

Vesa: 7:37

And then I got to know the bad crypto podcast guys and even collaborate with them and all that kind of stuff. So it was a superhighway that opened all of a sudden and because I had done some interesting things like, for example, this one collaboration with the Bollywood actress, we reached about 300 million people with that project. Already earlier I had a bit of notoriety and at that time, in blockchain art space especially, there weren't many people producing anything that was of much sort of quality, I would say, to the degree that these people were also hoping. So I lent a little bit of art credibility and they were then kind enough to give some resources for me to do some cool things, and this led for me to do collaborations with Charles Hoskinson and Charlie Lee and all kinds of things, and America started opening up and then now, eventually, the last two years has been doing many collaborations and living in Dubai. So that's it in a nutshell.

Joeri: 8:31

That's in a nutshell, but it's exciting that different worlds of stories come together, that you also have the artist background but also the understanding of the financial system and the interest in that. It's a bit the same with me, because I have the marketing background, but also the tech, the IT background which comes together. I have an investment club, so that helps when going into Web3, but still, you are into NFT art. You are one of the first, so at that moment there are, I guess, a lot of opportunities but probably a lot of challenges. Can you talk a bit about that at that moment, 2017, I think it was.

Vesa: 9:05

Yeah, it was. Despite having done some notable things and whatever, I had a health crisis earlier. That kind of crashed my company and then I had a bunch of debts and we left Finland with my wife. We just packed a car and our dog and drove through Europe to be in London. We're living in this shed of a house basically, where, if it got cold, the pipes would freeze, we wouldn't get any water into the house and rainwater would come through the front door and there was mold there.

Vesa: 9:33

So you can imagine it was a bunch of fun and it was quite a desperate time actually, from 2015 to 2017, to try to figure out of how it is that I'm going to be able to do or make a living and even survive in this, because I wasn't able to find a footing in the legacy art world. And then this crypto art thing started happening and the first couple of months of that was even very quiet and nothing really happened and it was a news BTC article that was done. But then the first Silver 8 Capital collected an artwork of mine for $5,000. And then at the same time, basically, I got an email from Mo Levin's team I think it was from the North American Bitcoin Conference and they said that, hey, if you want to come to Miami, we have a free booth for you to present your art and just come over. And that was for the first time in a few years that was possible for me. So we had the conversation with my wife that it's pretty crazy. This is the only money that we have, but this is an opportunity I don't want to miss. So this $5,000 that came in, I immediately just spent into an Airbnb and fly tickets to Miami and that was the height of the bull run.

Vesa: 10:40

Then it was January 2018. So it was such an electric thing going into that conference because it felt like you could charge your phone of the electricity in that conference. Everyone was buzzing so much. It was also new and just trying to figure out the first, even navigation of what the hell the space was all about was quite something. And it was the day after, I believe, of the conference that everything crashed. So it was the very height of the bull. And then it just saw all the promises, all the things. There was talk of a million dollar gallery for me from the main sponsor of that conference back then and turned out that the CEO of that company went to jail from a previous something very shady shit from before then. So it was actually good that collaboration never happened.

Vesa: 11:25

But it was a wild time to come into this space and then just building constantly the next couple of years of the bear and figuring out that NFTs started to come along and be a thing, because first it was about crypto art. It was. We came in to support the ideas and themes of decentralization and make art about why Bitcoin is important or why decentralization is of importance to pay attention to. And then of course, we use the technology. But it wasn't like, hey, let's make a monkey picture and put it on the blockchain and make a million dollars.

Vesa: 11:56

That was not at all the philosophy or the idea of it. I would say that the whole blockchain space now, or crypto space, is very different and how it feels when you go to conferences now as opposed before COVID, as to what it's after COVID going into them, all of a sudden the suits and the very much the business mentality and the sort of JB Morgan feel set into the whole space, and it was very different back then. So I'm a little bit of lamenting that, but that does happen when you get mass adoption and these kinds of things. So it is what it is.

Joeri: 12:29

Yeah, but I love the adventure and then the way that you continue to believe and to build. And it's when you are early it's always more difficult and but then you can. You get to choose your own way. But I think it's really impressive and inspiring for people, because these days the word NFTs it's we talked about. We knew that time when it was about speculation and so on. These days, I think, when I think about NFTs, I think about art, but also about the ownership and the benefits of the blockchain, and not about the speculation. So how do you see Web 3 transforming the landscape for artists like you and then talk about ownership or distribution or maybe other things?

Vesa: 13:11

Yeah, sure, I do sincerely think that it's one of the most important technologies for creativity, but for so many different other things, I know what the association of the word NFT now brings to people in many ways, and there were some of us who fought that tooth and nail for not to become this kind of cheap digital images with just crazy gamblers. That was not for me. It was like I said, I made high quality art, that during the first 13 years of my career I produced about 350 digital originals, so you can count from that and these required studios and collaborations and people and sometimes whole film crews, and some of these images, for example, looks, took me over two and a half years to complete just one image and that was produced in such a way that there was a documentary film involved in it and seven countries. So this is the kind of thing that I was steering it towards. That, finally, we have this digital Renaissance, and the way that I would elaborate on that is that you had in Renaissance Italy, you had the Medici family, and essentially they were able to do the Renaissance because they had a certain monetary innovation and how they started getting wealth, and then they had this mentality that they started funding the best of the arts and the best of the sciences and building towards something that is now inspired all for centuries after and still pulls in tourists through Italy after all this time and works as an inspiration for what can be if you use your intent and resources and a vision in a correct kind of way. And I would say that the Bitcoin decentralized family is the Medici family. It knows what is fundamentally breaking or already broken in the base pillars of society in many different ways. So you could just expand the idea of Renaissance Italy into the whole globe now in a certain sense. And then we have this.

Vesa: 15:01

I'm not an idealist in a way that I would say that everything has to be decentralized. That's not the point. But at the very least we should have decentralized systems who hold some of the centralized systems in check and at best they're playing with each other so that there's an actual competition to the system that what we've had for money for such a long time, that is clearly has a lot of issues. And not to say that the decentralized world doesn't have issues Of course they both do, but this is the way that, if they do hold each other in check, we have a lot more innovation and we have a lot more life, energy and, I would even say, individual freedom that comes with that.

Vesa: 15:38

And as an artist, you are an individualist, whether you like it or not. You can be about as grand a theme as you want to be, but the work that you do comes from a very individualistically created vision. And even though we collaborate a lot with my background in film I'm very used to working with even large teams and this kind of thing. It's important that we don't just succumb to these different kinds of collectivist ideas because we have such a history with them going so badly from before. So I'm a little bit sometimes distressed of how I see what the Western direction has been for a long time and where we're going in Canada and US and everywhere. And I do find it quite comfortable to be around many of the Web 3 people because they understand some of these issues quite on a deep level and they also want to solve them. So it's important that whatever we critique is that we also can provide some solutions for that, and Bitcoin certainly opened up a whole avenue of solutions when it came about, and I'm forever grateful for that and honor it.

Joeri: 16:44

Yeah, you mentioned that talking to other people. That's why I also like to be there at the Waos Summit meeting you on Dubai and so many other people talking about having this energy, seeing the possibilities. But also I saw your art over there and then I'm wondering you know digital art. How do you conceptualize your art pieces and how does the digital nature of your work influence the creative process?

Vesa: 17:11

I would say that, for example, there are master digital artists because I say that I'm a digital artist with a certain trepidation, and hear me out why because there are master digital artists who are like Andrew Jones, for example.

Vesa: 17:27

He has this spiritual perspective. He lends power from great themes from from the past and has these very epic images that have deep roots in traditions that go back centuries or thousands of years and whatever, and I think they're stunning images, but the way that he creates them is from pixels only, so he uses a computer from start to finish in order to create it. And I do find it that, for me personally, despite him being a very visionary artist and notoriety and he deserves all the accolade that he does for me his images leave me a little bit cerebral. The energy of those artworks leave me, from the heart side and the soul side, a little bit cold, even though that is the world that he wants to portray. This is why I started creating in a way that I get to know a person, who I'm body painting. I get to know their stories and who they are and their genuine expression and energy. In the phase when we're recording, that all comes to the surface and is captured in one way, then physical paintings and the energy that I put into that and capture that and do nature photography or whatever else I need to put in there from different kind of things that I get a tangible feeling about, that speak to my soul and speak to my heart, and then I built that onto the layer of digital that allows me to transport it all across the world with a click of a button. So that's really how I see it come together. But that's the technical side. Then what I find to be the inspiration is that the deeper that I'm in connection with this world and what the issues are, whatever it is now, some very hot topics are like the trans thing that is happening. What is happening to gender? What's going on in world economy. Are we now allowed to talk about spirituality as artists? Because for a long time it hasn't been anywhere in the established government funded art realms. It's almost like you're laughing stock if you start to talk about themes and issues of spirituality, for the most part because we're now a secular society and we've progressed over those kinds of themes and whatever. So what I'm saying is that what's very interesting about the metaverse and what's really interesting about the NFT space, even though they have been already usurped by a lot of the.

Vesa: 19:45

I would say the worst aspects of the legacy art world that we've seen during the last few decades is that you can now be in a third world country, you can use your creativity and you can put it through a digital marketplace and all of a sudden, be in the game in a way that you haven't been able to before. And, if you want to despite some people who say that you shouldn't do any cultural appropriation which I think is the dumbest thing of all time, because everything is cultural appropriation in a global setting you can put together a Chinese concept with Martian astronauts and I don't know elves from Middle Earth, and then put it together as a concept and create a whole world around it and throw it to the internet and see if it succeeds and if people like it. And what the art world doesn't yet understand is how much of a technological evolution has already rammed through the gates of what it was for a few decades before and what is now possible. And it's the same for the artists. The artists don't yet understand the amount of opportunity that they have, and then one of the big challenges that we have is that, by and large, our global community has not received the best art education for the last 30 years. It's become a very boutique and bouffé style of how you get educated in the arts, even in university. The grand themes and narratives are not yet not anymore as familiar as they were, perhaps for you and me as we were growing up, and it's difficult to communicate the language of art to people who aren't almost at all educated about it anymore.

Vesa: 21:19

And here's how we come back to the loop of why, for example, in Dubai, you will see a lot of art that is a Scrooge McDuck with a dollar sign and a Louis Vuitton bag and that's considered like an artistic thing that someone actually has the audacity to put on their wall because they think that's cool and each that are own, whatever, but it is very cheap from, let's say, the point of view of what art used to be considered just a while ago, when you go to the tradition of Michelangelo and Da Vinci and all the great masters of art throughout the centuries, even Dali, the guy was a master, master, marketer and amazing person, but he was doing Photoshop before Photoshop was a thing, and I dare you to be in front of a Dali artwork and not think that this is a real artist.

Vesa: 22:01

So there has been quite a dip in what we consider to be art on a general setting and it's become very pocketed into an isolated sort of bracket of society where some of the bastions are still upheld but for the major population, the art education has failed people and art itself has failed to evolve over the actual influence of films as a point of interest and a point of something that shows culture where to go, and as humble as that all sounds, but I think, at least for my part, I'm trying to maintain and evolve it to the point of where it does become competitive out of its own pockets again into a larger discussion in society that we would consider to be something of real importance, as opposed to a curiosity or something that the rich do for fun and do whatever games that they play.

Joeri: 22:56

I love that and you mentioned a few important things also about spirituality. I had a podcast episode that I released around Christmas around mindfulness in the metaverse and stuff about that, and also because we have three people think it's a hard world, hard terms it's technical, but also terms spirituality or mindfulness and so on can be really relevant. You mentioned the word metaverse. Do you have at the moment, or did you have, any projects going on related to the metaverse or maybe any insights how you see the place of art in the metaverse?

Vesa: 23:32

Yeah, we have. With Vesa Digital, which is my company, we have five different ongoing collaborations with different metaverse spaces. Asvoria just sent me a new preview of one of the places what we're building just before we started this podcast and it's looking very exciting. Zoan is a Finnish company. They built Cornerstone Land, and then there's Megaverse. There's a bunch of them that we work with that I think are of quite quality, and the first proper one that we put online was with Superworld.

Vesa: 24:04

We essentially I'm a bit of a pyramid head. I love all the things about the ancient world and ancient Egypt and dwelling into those rabbit holes, and I've been doing it forever. And essentially, one of the people that I body painted and this is in 2014 was the daughter of a very famous Egyptologist called John. Anthony West Was the Egyptologist and then Zoe is her daughter, and both of them traveled to Finland on another thing, and I went to New York previously to interview John for a film, a documentary film, about this whole Mayan calendar 2012, coming to an end cycle in 2012 actually, and that was a very mind blowing thing to me. So John introduced me to the concept of what the Luxor Temple in Egypt is and what it symbolizes, because it's built into the image of man and essentially, what the story of the temple and the building tells is how a pharaoh goes from birth, from the feet, to transcendence, to the head space, of how, if they live their lives correctly, their soul will ascend through this pillar structure that is there, that frames the Milky Way in a certain kind of way, and I just thought that was such a mind blowing thing that you would build this massive temple structure that tells the story of how society is held together cohesively and it has the chakra points inside of it and I was like holy shit, that this is. We talk about progress in the most minutiae way and some of the information that we have from what these ancient buildings were and what they knew and what they stood for, we have no idea and we haven't built anything like that for centuries, if not thousands of years. So what do we have to learn from the past?

Vesa: 25:44

Was that, with Superworld, we made a virtual reality version of this temple and then we embedded it with my artworks all across the way, because this is the kind of setting that if, in an ideal world, I was able to make the Luxor Temple into my private gallery for a while. That would be a dream come true, to such a degree that I would die happy after that. But I am able to build it now in the virtual world with a partner and kind of showcase my works and what they stand for in the kind of setting that I've always dreamed that they would be. And, of course, I can take a little bit more leeway, because it's not the same kind of sacred sites. It's still in the metaverse, even though we honoured what the whole thing is to a large degree. But there are some artworks that I wouldn't put into the real Luxor Temple as they are now in the virtual one. And now I can send this gallery to anyone in the world who has internet access and a laptop or a phone or whatever, because it's also an app. With a click on the button. You don't actually have to go there to see it, I can just send it to you and then you can click on many of the artworks that are in this temple and direct buy them as NFTs.

Vesa: 26:48

What I thought was so beautiful about this experiment that we did, and it's now maybe is it three years old, maybe already, or two years old at least. So it brings together the best from the past, showing that we actually have been not progressing, but it's opposite, from a certain perspective, for a long time and we can learn something from that. And then it showcases what is now possible. And then it opens up a lot of different questions of what will be possible tomorrow. And then a totally different thing of what we've been building with Zonan, for example, with their cornerstone land is that we made another gallery that is like this hovering space rock that is above the world, that is massive. This is golden liquid that makes my name and this crazy space rock that floats in the air and your avatar flies through the golden liquid. Then all of a sudden, you're in this massive space that is made out of art all across and it has 3D statues, it has fashion, it has the traditional artworks, but also on the inside of it because in Dubai we work with these art cars it has a race track. So for those who will produce with us the physical art cars and they will buy them they also have an option to buy the IP for them to get a virtual car, and if they do that and buy them as NFTs, then that means that they get to also race each other inside of this gallery, that is, inside of this metteros. So these are when you start to think on, this is one of the artworks by the way sorry, they're behind me, so we're.

Vesa: 28:14

Traditionally we think that an artwork is something that you hang on a wall like this, and it's static.

Vesa: 28:19

The next evolution of that is that you animate it to come to life and you point your mobile at it and it starts to move or do things or tell stories about the artwork or whatever.

Vesa: 28:27

Then you can implement that to be a whole digital space and then you can utilize all of that in a different kind of way and the jump from the physical to augmented reality to full blown virtual reality and all of those being at our availability now and then you can just have the digital original and showcase the ownership in a similar kind of way as you can showcase what a Model ESA is, the real one that everyone has a poster on their wall. But if you have the right certification and it's in the louvre and whatever, we know, that is the one. So it's an incredible opportunity. It's such a technological feat and it's so important for all of us, because our lives are so digital already, for us to have this. So it's a shame that now people associate NFTs with mutant monkeys or whatever it is. And now there's zero and they used to be a million, because that's not at all what this whole thing is about and why it's important.

Joeri: 29:23

I love that message that you're saying and, yeah, the word NFT. Indeed, for people, that's what they first think about. But I love also everything is coming together art and web-free and NFTs and metaverse and VR and VR and so many opportunities, and I thank you so much for all this positivism and all your enthusiastic stories, Vesa. I think people can really be want to learn more about you. They want to check out your art and so on. They want maybe to connect with you. Where would you like to send them?

Vesa: 29:58

Sure, there's two websites. One is artforcrypto. com, and then the older site with all the body painting works and abstract works is artevo. org. That's A-R-T-E-V-O. org, and then on Instagram and X it's @artbyvesa.

Joeri: 30:17

Great, as my listeners know, there are always show notes. There is always a blog article. All the links that Vesa just mentioned. You can find them in the article. You can also find them in the link that is in the description of this podcast episode. Vesa, it was really a pleasure to see you again online on my podcast.

Vesa: 30:43

Yuriy, thank you very much, and I'm also happy that I got to understand how your name is pronounced, because it's actually the same as they say it in Finland, even though it's written here in a different way, but it's easy for me to say it now, I think, correctly, because of this.

Joeri: 30:59

That's always the challenge. Sometimes people just listen to the podcast to see how to pronounce Yuriy's name, depending on where you are. The right way is Yuriy, but it really depends where you're coming from. And also I learned, I hope, how to pronounce your name correctly, vesa. Thanks for being on my show. Guys. Again an amazing episode, a positive episode around art, around NFTs. Be sure to check out Vesa's work. Also, if you think that this podcast episode is really interesting for people around you, be sure to share it with them. Send them a link to the podcast episode. Also, if you're not yet subscribed to the show, this is a really good moment to do this and, of course, I would like to see you back next time. Take care.