360° Art & Beyond.
“While the world outside is going full on crazy I build safe havens for myself and those resonating with source energy to retain a certain sanity.”
( Natural Warp - Jan 2022. )
This is a story on how my 360° art flow was created.
I believe it all started in my early twenties — somewhere 1996 — when I realized I often shut down when the world around me was becoming a bit much. I had a serious tendency to phase out back then.
One day I remembered I read as a kid some story about a character who fended off dark magic by imagining a protective sphere around itself. This sphere was described to have a reflective mirror shield on the outside which rendered it absolutely impenetrable for any unwanted energies.
After I started practicing this in my daily life I grew more and more creative with it. Decorating the insides of the mentally envisioned sphere with anything that would have a positive impact on my well being quickly grew into a habit. This helped me maintain my inner balance from within, which then would help me re-connect & react to the world around me in a more constructive way.
20 years later when I decided to focus 100% on my art and started getting my digital psychedelic creations on social media I discovered the format 360° photography and immediately started researching the methods of construction of such a digital spherical canvas.
Since the spheric construction was cube based it created the need for a conversion and I quickly arrived in the world of sacred geometry and universal mathematics experimenting with projections of platonic solids and polyhedra which are bordering exploring the multidimensional realms.
Finding Paul Bourke on this path was an immense help in unraveling my needs to create an artistic 360° workflow.
This was obviously a place I felt deeply at home due to my love for geometry and my never ceasing interest in the unseen — which started at the age of 6 in one of my first feverish dreams as a toddler. Needless to say I occasionally returned to those realms throughout my life with the help of entheogens.
After constructing the mechanics behind my 360° workflow, the gates of creativity were opened and the energy was unleashed. Somewhere 2015 / 2016 I started using the equirectangular map as my personal canvas on a regular basis and have never stopped since. This resulted in the creation of numerous 360° portfolios while searching for the best exposure and visitor experience as can be found on Artstation, Roundme and Sketchfab among others.
But still we are talking about a 2D experience as viewed on your flatscreen monitor. Which is not at all ideal for a 360° artwork.
My first VR experience of my own 360° art as viewed from within such a sphere with a virtual reality headset was indescribable ( much like a very serene psychedelic homecoming experience ). This opened up a whole new realm of possibilities of which the results can be found on my SteamVR workshop
Although the hollow sphere as a mentally conceived construct from within could be looked upon as being a finite room — the space this new reality offered me felt absolutely unlimited. Returning to such environment has time and time again proved to have a calming, inspiring, stabilizing and energizing effect on the self.
360° art, VR, NFTs and usecase.
5 years later in March 2020 I stumbled upon Somniumspace — a virtual world build on the ethereum blockchain — which completely shattered my field of vision and opened my eyes to yet another level of unlimited possibilities. While walking around for the first time in VR between these empty grassland NFT parcels, I immediately envisioned an empire of 360° artworks spread across the map. I dreamed of people strolling these virtual streets, seeing such a spherical artwork portal and deciding to walk right in and being mind blown while absorbing the womb-like artwork experience. This is how my life as a crypto artist began.
Not long after that in April /May 2020 I opened my first solo exhibition supported by Artur Sychov CEO of Somniumspace and June 5th 2020 I opened the first double parcel group exhibition ‘Take me to the Moon’ featuring 30+ crypto artists from all over the world.
Fast forward to March 6th 2021 in collaboration with Knownorigin and Somniumspace we have created the opportunity for artists to tokenize 360NFTs which are fully VR compatible in Somniumspace. More info on this launch you can read in this article.
From that moment on many 360° art galleries have been build across the Somniumspace map.
During the span of August 2021 V-RACE dropped 16 drivable VR compatible crypto vehicles on the Somniumspace market in sync with a 7x 360° NFT collab drop on Knownorigin since some of these cars were textured with those very 360° artworks. Find out more about this in the Somniumtimes article.
Later that year V-RACE dropped a series of VR compatible crypto avatars on the Somniumspace market coupled to those vehicles, wearing outfits textured with the very same 360° artworks.
Today Jan 5th 2022 you can find many of my 360° galleries across the Somniumspace map and even without VR gear you can explore the wonders of this realm.
I have bundled WEB access to a couple highlights of my gallery network on this page. For direct access in VR you will want to download the Somniumspace software to participate.
Thanks for reading !! Hope you enjoyed the content !!
You can find all my work through this all covering linktree :
https://linktr.ee/Natural_Warp
My webpage is setup to show the most actual projects : https://www.naturalwarp.com/
And direct purchase of VR compatible 360NFTs are possible at my Knownorigin profile : https://knownorigin.io/natural-warp
Find me on twitter here : https://twitter.com/Natural_Warp
