Alice in Cryptoland

It’s always late for Metaverse date.

Dec 9, 2020 Artist Statements

SuperRare

3 years ago

Editorial is open for submissions: [email protected]

It’s always late for Metaverse date.

By Eleonora Brizi

If you really don’t have time… here you go ⬇️ (Click play for audio narration)

Alice in CryptoLand
Edition 1 of 1
It’s always late for Metaverse date. Welcome everybody to the biggest illusion of humanity: time.

When you sit with a nice girl for two hours you think it’s only a minute, but when you sit on a hot stove for a minute you think it’s two hours

ALBERT EINSTEIN*

In Tim Burton’s Big Fish, time literally freezes when Edward Bloom first sees his future wife.

In The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Mr. Gateau makes a clock that runs backwards, so that the boys – including his son – who lost their lives in the war could come back home to their families.

“They say when you meet the love of your life, time stops, and that’s true. What they don’t tell you is that once time starts again, it moves extra fast to catch up.”

Welcome everybody to the biggest illusion of humanity: time.

Many words have been said and many pages have been written – in both the worlds of science and literature – about time and its never ending influence on our lives.
To date, psychologists and sociologists are still often referring to the fictional characters that the author Lewis Carroll masterfully created to inhabit the spaces of his masterpiece Alice in Wonderland.
And here we are, with Hackatao, in front of one of the most emblematic stories of all time: the White Rabbit and the rabbit hole.
If we all agree – amongst the many interpretations of the novel – that the adventures of Alice represent the transition from childhood to adulthood and all that goes with it, we would easily understand that what those long white jumping ears symbolize first is: curiosity. Alice is following the rabbit into the rabbit hole. She doesn’t know where he is going and yet she wants to know, pushed by her need for exploration and knowledge. In order to do so, she needs to fall into her subconscious, through a tunnel, therefore into Wonderland.

Hackatao’s Alice uses the VR oculus to satisfy her thirst and get into the land of many wonders. But the rabbit is not escaping anymore, he sits on her shoulder.
Another meaning that is central to the White Rabbit is, of course, time. The quadruped is always running late, at any point of the story.
“I’m late! I’m late! For a very important date!”
But something is different with this Alice. She now is the one holding the clock.
It’s the clock of the Metaverse: we hope you are ready for the journey.
It doesn’t matter what time you woke up today; in fact, you were already late.
Side effects: fuzzy and foggy.
Fasten the seat belt and go: through the spinning time of the Blockchain, the endorphins of social media craving, the eternal repetition of a second and the oblivion of a whole story captured in an instant, the auctions’ adrenaline, the bipolarism of “drops” and rises, new galleries new museums new platforms new systems new technologies popping up in the paradise of architecture and the best dream of a spider: the web.
In the Wonderland of virtual everything can happen and your clock will perpetually be set forward.

‘Everyone parts with everything eventually, my dear.’ Time (Alice Through the Looking Glass)

While the world is stopping and pausing, due to a global pandemic, the Metaverse is centrifuging. In a moment where we are forced to sit and think, to digest and assimilate the concept of a global time versus our personal time while working from home: what are we learning?
Does art, the vaccine for our souls, need a little bit more of time? Art has always required “a longer time” to exist when compared to the speed of its market. In the crypto art world and the Metaverse this phenomena manifests exponentially. Does art deserve, like us, to sit and think about “her” own time and a worldwide time? Do art pieces need “more time” to be absorbed by our minds, to be enjoyed, to enter our DNA and be part of that “genetic memory” which won’t allow us to forget about their spirit the day after, following a compulsive auction? Do artists need “more time” for their creative mind to keep up with the market demand? Is this “vaporization” of art, today radiant and tomorrow vanished, what we really need?

What is the time of life and what is the time of Wonderland?

Both of them are an illusion. But maybe, while floating into the rabbit hole, we should start setting our clocks backwards.
“It’s about time”.

* The New York Times, March 1929. The quotation was not directly from Einstein. Indeed, the reporter simply noted that the tale was being circulated. Yet, the vivid comparison was very popular and many variants evolved in the following years. Einstein was still based in Germany in 1929, so earlier instances of the anecdote may have been published in German.