What does art look like in an intangible digital space? Alexandra Grant, along with her partner, Keanu Reeves, is determined to help her fellow artists answer that question. The two are advisers for The Futureverse Foundation, a new charitable initiative designed to encourage artists to participate in the internet's next frontier by creating work to be contemplated and sold in the metaverse, an integrated network of virtual, digital worlds that in its most ambitious conceptions may come to resemble The Matrix.
In particular, The Futureverse Foundation is betting that non-fungible tokens, or NFTs (unique digital objects secured by blockchain technology), can be more than speculative instruments — that they can have genuine artistic value. The Futureverse Foundation is committed to funding artists who will create powerful works to be transformed into these crypto assets, proving that fine art has a home in the next iteration of the internet, often called Web 3.0.
"I feel like the Futureverse Foundation is a proposal. If we do have this opportunity of building a new economy of [cultural] exchange, how do we?" asks Grant. "It's new for all of us to be thinking about the partnerships between the art world, Hollywood and tech coming together in this really beautiful way."
Created in collaboration with Non-Fungible Labs and Fluf World, a New Zealand-based NFT company, The Futureverse Foundation plans to "make the metaverse accessible to more people, especially from disadvantaged backgrounds," Grant says. "This is the beginning, it's a nascent moment for a technological shift where some people understand that they're already in the metaverse, and some people don't know what an NFT is."
Grant, along with Reeves and Brooke Howard-Smith, co-founder of Non-Fungible Labs, plans to help move artists who work in traditional two- and three-dimensional mediums into the digital space by guiding them in the process of translating their art into NFTs, for sale in the metaverse.
"I am honored to be joining Non-Fungible Labs' efforts in cooperation with Alexandra Grant for the extraordinary program and opportunity of the Futureverse Foundation, in support of artists and creators globally," Reeves said in a statement.
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