Work of Art in the Age of Metaverse: Exploring digital art through augmented reality

Abstract

The creation of artworks in the metaverse as unique files that exist on a blockchain world of the non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have revitalized discussions over the uniqueness of a work of art. Similar to the art world market in Second Life, this has presented a novel way to collect imported or natively digital art. This raises the following questions: What are the processes that artwork undergoes in the web 3.0 or metaverse? What constitutes the reproduction/recreation of a work of art? Which tools can be exploited to create more content for this universe? How does this new approach affect ownership, scarcity and authenticity? Unlike art productions that find a place in museums or galleries, Darağaç Art Collective independently uses the streets both as their location, and as their canvas. This creates the need to store the artworks as fully as possible in any form available. With this aim, a team of architects, designers and software engineers designed, implemented and tested a mobile application to represent and recreate the experience of the artworks in the digital environment. The artworks of independent artists were collected virtually and compiled in a relational database over the years, and are displayed in their geographical coordinates, and represented in the 3D world. After discussion on how to represent the artworks, it was decided that some only exist in videos and photographs, therefore, we decided to use the archaeology of digital data and present them in 3D space, to ensure their continued existence once they had been performed or exhibited. Illustrated by the case of our augmented application, this paper discusses the reproduction of ownership and scarcity of artworks in terms of preserving a cultural heritage in the metaverse.