The pedigree of an artist used to be measured by which galleries showed their work, who purchased their art and where they received their education. Such hallmarks provided a sort of “quality assurance” for audiences and prospective buyers.

But with the growing popularity of digital art, that paradigm is shifting.

No longer being tethered to the measurements of old, some of today’s digital artists are forgoing the “traditional” path to live a life that encompasses both a full-time non-art career and a career in the arts.

One digital artist operating by the brush of his own canvas is Los Angeles native Other World—a full-time biomedical engineering PhD student who also happens to be creating on-chain works that are growing in popularity. (He asked that his real name not be used.)

His first solo exhibition—Visions by PROOF, the web3 community creating real life events for artists and collectors to connect that was acquired by Yuga Labs in February—saw his digital works displayed in printed form and showcased like a traditional gallery at Soho House West Hollywood last February to great acclaim.

Quite the milestone for a digital artist who is still a full-time student in a non-art related field.

“Art has always been part of my life,” Other World said to me in a recent interview. “I’ve always enjoyed drawing and illustrating, usually with just a pencil on paper as a kid. I would do that just for fun at home or sometimes at school.”

During the pandemic, Other World experimented with digital art using a collage approach where he would copy and paste images he found online to create a piece.

“I was posting my art on Instagram and Twitter and wanted to advance my career beyond these simple works,” he said. “There wasn’t much substance to them and I wanted to create more detailed works, things that I might see in a gallery or a museum. Going in that direction, the work started having more and more details, grew larger in scale and led to where we are today.”

Kissed the Sun by OtherWorld

Magnus Resch, an art market expert and lecturer at Yale University’s School of Management, is impressed Other World has had the success he’s had without a background in traditional art.

“Other World built up his following and his sales in a web3 environment,” Resch said to me in a recent conversation. “He didn't have a degree from Yale School of Art or an installation at the MoMA but was able to remain dedicated to his work and tap into the power of web3 community.”

Resch believes Other World is an example of a different kind of artist who didn’t follow the traditional path, but who stuck with the craft and achieved success through nontraditional means.

But whether or not one attends art school is irrelevant if their artistic output is desirable from an audience’s perspective and is something they are willing to consume.

“In the eyes of the traditional art market, it’s unconventional, but through the eyes of the web3 community, it’s not so unconventional,” Resch said. “What PROOF is doing now is unconventional in the sense it’s working closely together with one artist and replicating a gallery setting and introducing an artist to a wider community—whereas before, these online communities would create purely online events. Equally, the work itself is now a physical work instead of just being a digital work. We are now at the stage where both worlds collide.”

The intersection of digital and physical art is becoming blurred, such that you can move from one to the other or vice versa to create an immersive and interactive world. That wouldn’t be possible without blockchain. 

“Blockchain is a breakthrough technology where now we can own digital items, where in the past we couldn’t do that,” Other World said. “I played a lot of RuneScape as a kid, and some kids would play for hours, days and months to acquire swords or hats. Those items have some value but once those servers are shut down and people stop playing, they’re not really worth anything. Now, you have nonfungible tokens (NFTs) on the really popular blockchains like Ethereum and the items can live for a longer time.”

Read more: Digital Artist Osinachi Is on a Mission to Merge Web3 and Traditional Art

Which is why Other World believes blockchain provides an easier distribution method for his artwork than the traditional art market.

“I create my art digitally and can digitally mint them,” he said. “I don’t have to go and print them and then sell them as prints—I can sell them in digital form—which is much more natural for a digital artist. Since I’ve always been busy with school, I’ve never had time to pursue a traditional art career, and having everything digital where you don’t have to worry about shipping and dealing with physical goods has made it a lot easier to get my art into collectors’ hands.”

He continued, “In an exhibition setting, people have been used to viewing works as physicals for hundreds of years. Screens are a relatively new technology for us, even for those who grew up with screens. Physicals are a more natural way to take in art for the vast majority of people.”

Which is why Other World’s gallery with PROOF exhibited his digital works in physical print form.

Other World previously viewed the unlinked nature of digital and physical as a problem, but then he began to embrace physical prints as something unique and separate from the digital mint and experience.

“At the moment, there’s no way to one-hundred-percent guarantee a physical stays with the digital,” Other World said. “Even with QR codes, the physical is intrinsically unlinked from the digital. I don’t think that’s a deterrent to create physical and digital works, but the digital often gets separated from the physical when it gets resold. This happens to the biggest artists in the space and it’s a normal thing at the moment. I don’t know how it will ever be fixed—or if even needs to be fixed.”

Because viewing a piece digitally and viewing a piece physically—even if the piece is the same—is a different experience.

“Some people might prefer to own the NFT, which for a digital artist is the original file—the first thing to come out of a program,” Other World said. “With a physical print, you can print it a million different ways. Depending on how you print it, the texture will be different, the details will be slightly different, the colors will be slightly different. Even if it’s the same file you print and mint, there’s already something intrinsically different between the two.”

Other World’s current artistic approach is heavily based in collage, taking classical works and combining them to create a scene by taking parts of other scenes.

“The characters and themes didn’t really come together all at once—I drew the cloaks in one piece but the faces were different, and I drew the faces in another piece but they were without the cloaks,” he said. “In the ‘The Last Prayer’ piece, that’s where both the colorful cloaks and the faces were drawn together for the first time.”

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It’s a look into how characters people now recognize as uniquely Other World’s took time to develop—a progression familiar to many other artists and their notable works of art.

“How I draw the characters is always changing,” Other World said. “And they will continue to change.”

The initial prompt for Other World to take classical art work and reinvent it with his lens was born out of a desire to simply create something fun and visually pleasing. By focusing on the “fun,” he’s ensuring his artistic joy remains intact, even as his career grows.

“Whatever you do for a career will always have a ‘work’ aspect to it or aspects that you don’t like doing,” Other World said. “For example, marketing is not something I particularly enjoy. As an artist, you have to complete all of those entrepreneurial tasks to push your career forward, but when it comes to creating the art, I want to keep it fun, keep the love for the craft alive and keep it as true to me as possible.”

He continued, “With that said, you should treat it no different from any other career. I’ve seen it in a lot of other artists—and even in myself at times—this idea or trap of ‘making art when you feel like it.’ That’s great, but you don’t see a CEO or real estate agent just going to work when they feel like it. You need to make art every day or else you’ll fall behind and not reach your full potential. You need to give it your all.”

lead image: Trail of Fire by OtherWorld

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Author: Stephen Laddin