Towards the start of the year an email landed in my inbox that would prove to have an interesting effect on my life. The email simply read: “WE NEED TO TALK!” The email was from a good friend of mine and extremely talented virtual reality artist by the name of ‘Metageist’.
If you’re wondering, my name is Paradoxx. I’m an artist, filmmaker, and writer from the UK. Paradoxx is not my real name…obviously. It is however the alias I’ve been known by in recent times. In fact, it has been the name and identity that two separate artists have been sharing for some time now. No, before you ask, the other artist isn’t Metageist, but this did all start when I received the email from them.
The last time I received a message like this from Metageist was years before, and that message led me down the rabbit hole which is CryptoCurrency. I became obsessed with this new ‘magic internet money’ and I fully blame Metageist for the days, weeks, months, and years I have spent glued to my phone watching the crypto markets.
So when I saw this new email my initial thoughts were: ‘Oh god, what this time?’. We set up a telephone meeting the following day and a very excited Metageist proceeded to spill the beans on their latest discovery: Crypto Art.
It took me some weeks to fully understand exactly why Metageist was so excited but when the penny finally dropped, I was hooked!
As with anything exciting in peoples’ lives, I wanted to talk about it. Most of my friends were so uninterested it was painful. Except for one, an American artist and long term friend known as ‘Siege187’. I have never actually met Siege in the real world. He lives on the other side of the planet, but this has not stopped us from working together on a plethora of projects over the years. Siege is that guy you go to with crazy ideas, which I have a lot of, and they simply say: Let’s do it!
Over the next few weeks, I spent a lot of time researching to better understand this strange new movement called CryptoArt. This inspired many conversations about what type of art each of us would create if we ever applied for artist status on the SuperRare platform.
Siege and I have a twin-like taste in film and art, and predictably we started suggesting similar art projects. This sparked the longstanding habit of riffing off each other’s ideas and working from one another’s strengths. We were soon joking that It would be very efficient if we could just merge our brains and create a super artist…
Just to be clear, we did not undergo this evil scientist-esque medical procedure to merge our brains together, but we did decide to join forces.