Metaverse Landscape 18: Decentraland Parcel -126,-78
Simon Denny, 2023

Oil on canvas, UV print, Ethereum paper wallet, dynamic ERC-721 NFT, 100 x 100 x 4.5cm, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Petzel Gallery.

Metaverse Landscape 18: Decentraland Parcel -126,-78 is a landscape painting that depicts a crypto token representing ownership of a property in the metaverse Decentraland. Many metaverse projects tether ownership of plots of land in virtual worlds to crypto tokens, which are often bought and sold on NFT markets with cryptocurrency. A leading project, Decentraland, depicts this land ownership with map-like parcels which resemble simple grid-like parts of larger simplified top-down maps of these digital worlds – reducing representation pictorially to simple patterns of “roads” and empty “plots” as lines and grids. Denny has translated this pictorial paradigm into a 1x1m canvas using layers of hand painted oil paint and ink-jet prints based on the original property token’s motifs, recalling mid-century modern painting projects in motif and materials. Each canvas has QR codes on their sides that link to the original property token – essentially property owned by a metaverse participant – and a new token, attached to the canvas, that tracks the owner of the original property the painting depicts and linking them in blockchain code to the owner of the painting. These new tokens are live software, and update reflecting any change of ownership in either the painting or the “land” depicted. Ownership is revisited through combining formats and languages of depicting space from artistic traditions and brought to bear on new relics of emergent worlds.