Metaverse Awakening

In the last year, the Metaverse has entered into the popular lexicon, going from an esoteric idea from the realm of science fiction to becoming our future reality. With this has come many questions about what this future plane of existence will be like, and how we humans will inhabit it. Eventually, the Metaverse user interface may become simply “The Interface” through which humans experience reality. It dawned on us that this has immense implications for how human expression and creativity will manifest itself within this new world. Just as George Orwell highlighted how the limitations of human language can constrain the thoughts we are able to think and share, limitations in our movements and capabilites in the Metaverse will likewise constrain our thoughts and ability to self-express. To bring these issues to the fore and start a global conversation about them, we began working on Movement Generation, a generative NFT series depicting a Metaverse world that provides full degrees of freedom to both avatars and world-builders. This juxtaposes sharply with the current state of Metaverses today, showcasing the long road ahead to fully unlocking human creativity and self-expression in the Metaverse. Our hope is these works of art will shine like a light at the end of a long tunnel, beckoning Metaverse architects to continue to strive for endowing humans with ever greater freedom and control in the Metaverses of tomorrow.

Squad Formation

A project of this scope required a collective effort by artists from multiple domains (architecture, cinematography, music, dance and software development). In the NFT community spirit of artist empowerment, we decided to collaborate in a squad formation. As a squad, we are all co-owners in the works we create, stacking ETH equally as our creations exchange hands by the art collectors of the world. We feel strongly that artist work-for-hire NFT drops go against what NFT’s are all about and are showing by example that there is a better way.

The Choreography

Dance is one of the rawest forms of self-expression. The full capture of movement and it’s translation into the Metaverse is an imperfectly solved problem. And yet, dance within a digital medium affords new opportunities and possibilities. It enables the immortalization of an otherwise fleeting performance. By careful design, it allows for the re-configuration of multiple choreographies to the same song, creating an explosion of new, unique choreographies. The dancer inherits the leverage and automation available to the programmer, amplifying their art form and with it the fruits of their labor. Bettina Uhrweiller created 7 unique Popping choreographies to Valentin Liechti’s song Concrete Bongo [120.2], as well as several freestyle interpretations, and we developed a technique to seamlessly mix and match these choreographies, allowing us to generate 106’000 unique, on-beat choreography performances to a single song.

The Architecture

The Metaverse is the ultimate frontier for architecture.

“When I worked as an architect for real-world projects, I was endlessly constrained by the current state of construction know-how, available materials and project budgets, forcing me to drastically simplify my designs and scrap most of the innovative elements I wanted to bring to the world. The Metaverse frees me of all these constraints and allows me to unleash my full imagination when designing structures.”

Ayoub Ahmad

The buildings designed for this drop are a celebration of this new found freedom. Existing Metaverses still have limitations on the complexity and level of detail they can currently support, whereas the structures generated for this drop make no compromises.

The Song

Valentin Liechti produced Concrete Bongo [120.2], a perfectly looping 1 minute song exclusively for this drop.

“I was inspired to create a soundtrack that combined the early days of Hip-Hop sampling with a more contemporary futuristic sound pioneered by Aphex Twin. The result was a piece that nods at the Hip-Hop culture created in the “real” world, while designing a sound of the future that feels native to the Metaverse.”

Valentin Liechti

Engineered as a perfect loop, without a recognizable ending, the song allows every NFT’s dance performance to continue into infinity, eschewing the concepts of time and dancer stamina. The result is mesmerizing -- an infinite stream of energy and creative expression contained within each NFT.

The Video Generator

Every NFT starts off as a seed. This seed is a randomly generated hash that is stored on the Ethereum blockchain when the NFT is minted. Our video generator ingests this seed, and by sampling from it, deterministically generates the NFT’s corresponding video. The seed decides the constellation of dance choreographies, Metaverse scenes, effects and filters applied to the final video as well as how and when to switch between the multiple cameras that filmed the dance performances. It pulls together the artistic contributions from the entire squad and puts them all into a single work of art. The video generator will be open-sourced post-drop so that any collector can independently re-generate their NFT artwork from their seed.

The NFT Drop

The final result of this squad collaboration will be a limited series of 500 unique dance choreography NFT’s priced at 0.1 ETH each. These pieces will be randomly generated at mint time from a possible universe of 672 million property permutations. The drop date will be announced soon. Be a part of history by collecting one of the world’s first generative dance choreography NFTs, and help start the global conversation around how to empower and enable human creativity and self-expression in the Metaverse’s of the future.

In squads we trust,

MVMT GEN SQUAD

Links:

Sign up for our newsletter: movementgeneration.io

Follow us on Twitter: twitter.com/mvmtgen

Join the conversation on Discord: discord.gg/k2uzQeVCRm