Have you ever had those dreams where you’re in a familiar place that’s just off somehow? Like you’re in the hallway of your high school and the lockers are made of wet floral foam. Or you’re in your own house and there’s a neon green monitor lizard hanging out on the La-Z-Boy and you only think it’s weird because you don’t remember buying the La-Z-Boy. Or you’re in your local subway station and instead of the usual platform floor made from concrete and antibiotic-resistant bacteria, you’re standing on grass and feeling wildflowers brush against your ankles.

Ryan Koopmans, the artist behind “The Wild Within,” is a master of this liminality, and he’s back with another dreamy NFT art series that depicts human-made environments taken over by natural plant life. While “The Wild Within” focused on abandoned Soviet-era buildings in Georgia, “Tunnel Vision” takes place in the underground metro stations in Stockholm, Sweden.

Born in the Netherlands and raised in British Columbia, Canada, Koopmans moved to New York after completing university at the Vancouver campus of University of British Columbia. He went to grad school at The School of Visual Arts where he earned his Masters of Fine Art in Photography, Video & Related Media in 2012. Two years later, he packed up and traveled the world as a professional photographer before settling in Stockholm, where his creative collaborator, Swedish artist Alice Wexell, also lives.

Koopmans collaborated with Wexell on “Tunnel Vision,” too. The first work in the series, “Rush Hour,” depicts a pair of escalators leading in and out of a metro station. The station’s floor is an overgrowth of greenery; moss climbs the staircase between the escalators and ivy drapes over the hanging signs.

The fiery red “ceiling” of the station isn’t really a ceiling at all; it looks more like an opening into another realm. Despite the wall-to-wall plants, the red opening gives the entire piece an ominous feeling. Almost like a descent into the Inferno, only in reverse.

“A hundred percent,” Koopmans laughs. “I was speaking to someone the other day, a collector, and that was their exact reading as well: an <em>ascent</em> into hell. With this project, we’re creating uncanny environments. They may be meditative or relaxing, but there’s an uncertainty about what the mood is.”

It’s worth noting that the station in “Rush Hour” is based upon an actual metro station in Stockholm—all of the works in “Tunnel Vision” are based on real metro stations. “Rush Hour” is a manipulated photo of the famous Solna Centrum station. The plant life is not really there; the ceiling, however, is.

“And it’s a constant cycle of ascending and descending to reference the cyclical nature of the public transportation system,” he continues, referring to the animation aspects of the works in the series. “The trains are constantly going on this endless loop and the escalators are also going on this constant up and down cycle.”

There’s another paradox in the series that Koopmans points out: the industrial setting that humans carved into the natural earth combined with the plant life that has been digitally added.

Koopmans explained that each work in “Tunnel Vision” (and also in “The Wild Within”) began as a regular 2D photograph. He and Wexell also shot video footage of each space. Then, they combined them to make a 3D environment using a special 3D software. The entire innovative process for each work would eventually yield a video that was 2D but with 3D rendered elements. Each work is also set to music created specifically for this series by Swedish composers Tobias Hellkvist and Erik Thomé.

“It’s like a multimedia collage,” Koopmans says.

Three other works in “Tunnel Vision”—“Habitat,” “Horizon,” and “Machine”—feature escalators. The only one that doesn’t depict a floor overtaken with foliage is “Horizon;” instead, the floor is flooded with rippling, pulsing water. “Everlasting” and “Transcendence” show us the actual trains. The train in “Everlasting” even stops and opens the doors before going back in the same direction from which it came. In each work in “Tunnel Vision,” the plants—grass, flowers, and saplings—move and flutter, as if there was a natural breeze, a constant flow of air in the underground metro.

The series is both trippy and relaxing, whimsical and jarring. The environments presented are simultaneously alluring and foreboding. It’s folklore encased in science fiction…or the opposite. Maybe even both at the same time. Koopmans aimed to play with contradictions—each installment in the series draws the viewer in and traps them there.

The first work of the series, “Rush Hour,” is now available to view on SuperRare.

There is more opportunity for humans to connect with one another than ever before, but also more opportunity for more intense isolation. The last two years have perhaps measured this contradiction best, with platforms online continuing to bring us together virtually while also serving as a constant reminder of the distance between each person and real life communities and spaces. Is it any surprise, then, that DJ, producer, and musician Alex Botwin, whose stage name is Paper Diamond, developed his most recent creative endeavor over the course of the past year, a time when many of us began to navigate re-learning the art of human interaction as well as growing and transforming it?

Paper Diamond’s “Left To My Own Devices,” or LMTOD, is his first NFT collection. The series contains five single-edition pieces. Prior to “Left To My Own Devices,” Paper Diamond released three albums: 2011’s Levitate, 2013’s Paragon, and 2018’s Holograms. He’s played festivals including Coachella, Electric Zoo, Electric Forest, Lollapalooza, and Bonnaroo to crowds who showed up to experience the physical, visceral, concrete effects of his music. His tracks are designed for sensation, thumping and pulsing but also smooth and gliding, grounding listeners, connecting them to their own bodies and the bodies that surround them. And though his music is available outside the context of a festival stage, namely on music streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music, this is Paper Diamond’s first major foray into a medium where his audience is entirely a virtual one. 

“Patiently, I’ve spent the last year creating & observing the change that NFTs are establishing,” he said. He views NFTs as an industry changing stride forward for artists, excited that “humans can connect directly without big companies in the middle. Communities are being formed. There is a newfound freedom in creativity.” He is fascinated by the ever-blurring distinction between the physical and virtual worlds, and he seeks to explore what that means in relation to the ways people are able to connect. “Left To My Own Devices” stands as “a perspective on life, death, time, and connectivity through our digital age.” Each piece incorporates sounds and animations entirely of Paper Diamond’s conception, all addressing these very themes, meditating on not only the innovation that humanity’s relationship with technology brings, but also exercising a degree of caution, thrilled for what the future might hold, yet aware that nothing is perfect, that unexpected challenges always have the possibility to arise, which in turn is part of the adventure.

Perhaps, when virtual connectivity is constant, ever-present, overbearing, it does not. How do we find balance, stave off screen burnout? The collection is called “Left To My Own Devices,” explicitly addressing isolation, which in this case is not always a painful or lonely thing, but a space to create and grow and explore. To reflect. “I believe that we are all seeking human connection,” he said. Separating oneself from posts and feeds, instead using technology as a solo tool for creation, is just as much a means of connectivity, if not so obvious, and maybe more conducive to real connection rather than the superficial. Technology is what allowed Paper Diamond to create each piece in the collection on his own. But it also is what allows him to share his work with the world. He does also ask, “What would the world be like if it were Left To My Own Devices?”

In this series of NFTs, he builds out a space that is entirely his, where he has room not necessarily to provide an answer, because the question itself is enormous and potentially unanswerable. But he imagines and explores the complexities and incongruities that arise when the real and virtual worlds no longer appear separate, when physical and online connection must both coexist and compete, and what that reveals about humanity’s relationship with art and culture.