The Metaverse Is Art
The word “Metaverse” is getting a lot of play — well on its way to make the OED new words for 2022. An OED pick for 2021; Media Literacy; sets it up to bring catchwords like “metaventions” and “metalectual properties” for “metaceptual” creations to be used for “metacognizing” the properties of this new “metanet” metaphor that’s “metaversally” implied by “Metaverse”.
Updating the lexicon is signaling that device-oriented communications, here since the very first word was written, has entered a new phase now that content comes with metadata… soon in an overwhelming flow as every tangible “thing” in an Internet-of-Things adds to it. This much information requires metadata to have a position in language that Artificial Intelligence recognizes as an actor credited with its own actions.
That happening now is a recognition that AI has no vocabulary for informing us of how its “metamind” perceives its role. The word “Metaverse” acknowledges that electronic media is officially hosting a hand-over of complex content for translation into something we both understand.
Context
The concept of Metaverse borrows from characteristics that the Internet has, since its beginnings, associated with art.
The electronic device was introduced to the function of graphic interfaces from a 1960s “look” found in Systemic Art and Process Art. These presaged the Graphic User Interface. Graphics are evidenced in every medium between the virtual and actual.
Art continued being an influence as electronic media reached ever higher levels of use. In the mobile device, it’s taken for granted that augmentation of the actor/observer presence into device operator engines is through graphics — where the word Metaverse grows out of that association with orientations within virtual reality.
To the technician’s involvement with advancements, and the users with uses, there is little sense of this emergence of the Metaverse. But artists are fully cognizant of it. This concept has always been in the language of art.
Perspective
Preface is portent. Metaphorically, what Metaverse is today was what half a dozen Systemic Art works were to those challenged by Art Literacy decades ago. Everything; from referencing analogs that digitally interface with virtual content, to identifying the origins of digital contrivances; has already been developed.
Knowing the ways image recognition is used by AI, for sensing meaningful context, has an equal place in “Media Literacy”. The resource found in https://sway.office.com/RPJj5jZ8mzG8D3rW communicates this through digital graphic images that, when made NFTs, become indicators a Metaverse “metacognizes” as a virtual likeness — just as similitude always has in art.
Meaning
In defining Virtual Reality as every “thing” that passes through a digitization phase, and Media as the data accumulated by AI used to relate NFTs to the reality they originated from, Metaverse becomes simply an environment that is validated by the presence of AI’s interpretations.
The popular description of Metaverse trivializes it into a digital showcase. Instead, it is more akin to what a responsible art tethers this new word to, in its goal of nurturing AI with clear sources of trusted content.
At the moment, the NFT movement is evenly divided between idealists and opportunists. This concept of Metaverse can be what keeps both their goals interoperable.