Metaverse dérive: NFT Сities
Othmane Kandri is an architect and artist with a high interest in combining architecture and digital art. Kandri gained his first degree from IUVA university in Venice, where he worked with Yona Friedman for the 2017 Venice Biennale and was exposed to different forms of expression, enriching his compositional working processes and historical knowledge. He later moved to London to develop his strong interest in experimental architecture, and studied at the London Metropolitan University and the AA, focusing on exploring both the opportunities and the constraints of emergent conditions in an attempt to redefine the symbiotic footprint of the built environment and challenge conventional notions of material and form. He believes in an architectural intelligence contributing to the evolution of the discipline by embracing new lifestyles and conceptions of space. Othmane is currently working at Zaha Hadid Architects in London and travels across various projects in Asia and Europe.
Jessica María Baldivieso Zarruk is an artist born in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia. In her practice she uses art to understand the fundamentals of space as it is now, and the elements that make an everyday life experience. Recently she broke away from conventional painting, working with projects that include video and installation. She received both a BS in Architecture (2014) and a BA in Art Studio (2016) from the University of Arkansas (USA). Jessica has participated in many group exhibitions and biennials, including International Visual Arts Biennial (Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia), Plan C at The Cedars Union (Dallas, TX, USA), as well as held solo shows at MAC Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (Santa Cruz, Bolivia) and Centro Cultural Casa Melchor Pinto (Santa Cruz, Bolivia). She is currently based in Dallas, Texas.
Oğuz Emre Bal is a Madrid-based Turkish artist, using emerging software and hardware such as augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and 3d printing to realise his works about space’s interdimensional bodily experience and cognitive realities. He investigates new materialism beyond physical boundaries by the notions of space and reality, nature and technology, and reflects these relations in his artworks. Between the years 2017 and 2022, his artworks were exhibited at many international art festivals, such as 16th Venice Biennale, Cyfest (Saint Petersburg, Russia), Adaf (Athens, Greece), Connect for Creativity Project by British Council (Belgrade, Serbia), and Sonar +D (Istanbul, Turkey). Currently, he continues his design and art projects under the scope of un10design.com which he co-founded in 2017 in Istanbul.
“In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there,” Guy Debord (1958) put famously about the psychogeographical perspectives of his method of urban discovery. In our group drop, devoted to opportunities of digital architecture between online and offline worlds, we drop too. In this collective journey, we want to withdraw the conventions of living cities as public and private property, issues of access, boundaries of touch, boundaries of gaze, and the routines of the travel restricted to the means of transportation. The group show is an attempt to bring space back into the crypto universe as an opportunity for mediation and conversation between artists and the audience. The conversational approach is crucial here, so the collective NFT city is a creative attempt of three international artists with backgrounds in architecture. All three are not only architectural visionaries but global nomads themselves. Jessica Baldivieso — painter and mixed media artist, who is currently based in Dallas, Texas, finds inspiration in the architecture of Bolivia, where she was born and grew up. Othman Kandri, who works for Zaha Hadid Architects in London, builds his professional life between the UK and Italy. Oguz Emre Bal is an internationally recognized Turkish artist and architect who now lives in Madrid. The aesthetic journey proposed in the drop knows no boundaries as well. More than that, the urban life in the drop, following Debord, deconstructs existing relations not just between the urban dwellers but the elements of constructions themselves. In Baldivieso’s work the purity of perspective is given in fullness of potentiality and openness. Kandri’s work plays with the viewers' gaze on architecture that lives in his models of alternative cities both as an extremely close reading of the city’s textile and macrostructure. Bal’s droplets are raw material of urban elements and an architectural equivalent to a cell in biology.
