While many consumers are still trying to wrap their heads around what NFTs are, others in the advertising, creative and tech worlds have enthusiastically embraced them. Even companies ranging from Crock-Pot to McDonald’s have made NFTs part of their marketing scheme. Until now, such ideas have been largely simple, centered on pieces of digital art. But brands exploring ways to take their NFT ideas beyond the virtual might take inspiration from Dreamverse, billed as the "first-ever NFT art and music festival.”

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Dreamverse was a satellite event to last week's third installment of NFT.NYC, an annual week-long conference in New York about all things non-fungible. It was a particularly triumphant celebration after a year of surging excitement for digital assets such as NFTs and the metaverse. Estimates for the 2021 NFT.NYC event saw record attendance at around 5,000 participants attending panels covering everything from community building to outer space. 

Dreamverse attempted to move from intellectualizing to actualizing with a multi-dimensional, real-world experience centered on NFTs. Its headline act? The inaugural in-person display of Beeple’s NFT “Everydays: The First 5000 Days,” which sold for a record $69 million at Christie’s in March.

Dreamverse was the brainchild of Metapurse, the NFT investment firm and production studio founded by MetaKovan (aka Vignesh Sundaresan), the blockchain entrepreneur who purchased Beeple’s NFT, and event agency Eventique. It was a two-part experience  comprising art gallery during the day and party at night, taking place last Thursday within the cavernous, ex-nightclub Terminal 5 in New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood. The festival promised a collision of art, music and technology and gathered over 150 NFT creators curated by Time and seminal NFT artists Josie Bellini, Mattia Cuttini, Hackatao, Judy Mam, Metageist, Alotta Money, Skeenee, Snowfro, Sparrow and Angie Taylor.

Liron David, founder of Eventique, had overseen a number of NFT events throughout NFT.NYC week, but “Dreamverse was unlike any other that was happening during the conference,” he said, pointing out the mammoth task of creating an immersive space that would attempt to actualize an artform still vague and mysterious to many—a process that started at ticket-purchase.

Most tickets to Dreamverse came in the form of actual NFTs (designed by artist Money), sold in different tiers. Besides a $175 NFT-less ticket to the Dreamverse party, every other tier was accompanied by a unique token, with prices ranging up to $2,500. Distributed as sepia-toned images, the tickets filled with colorful crypto art after attendees scanned into the event, granting each entrant an NFT of their own. Such reflected David’s scheme to engage attendees in every aspect of the experience, from RSVP to how they viewed the art to the debut of Beeple’s much-anticipated exhibition.

A representative from Dreamverse did not disclose full ticket sales data but said the 30 $2,500-tier tickets available were the first to sell out. The gallery and party combined also saw attendance of more than 3,000 people.

“We treat it where the people who come are the ones who are creating, it's not just us trying to create an environment for them to just come and experience,” said David. “We want them to be a part of the creation of it.”

The gallery

Attendees entered Dreamverse through a black tunnel lined with tube lights that flashed psychedelic strobe patterns, like Han Solo's Millenium Falcon going into lightspeed. 

Visitors then came upon a table of physical merchandise for sale on one side and a group of artists called The Dada Collective creating a painting on the other. Like a metaphor for stepping away from the past and into the future, that led the way to the kaleidoscopic Dreamverse NFT gallery.

The gallery dominated the venue with flat-screen televisions that looped NFTs, as an art gallery would hang a painting or photograph. The range of works was vast. Some NFTs resembled traditional art, as if created by virtual paint or ink. One work by Rare Designer called “Pepalisa” reworks Da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” into a grinning frog in the same pose and backdrop. It even featured a pixelated, gold border that resembled an ornately carved frame.

Some NFTs played like animated movies. In Pussy Riot’s elaborate “Holy Squirt #1,” a pig-man discovers a chalice at the foot of a vaginal structure spouting fluid. He consumes the fluid and a colossal woman with neon blue pigtails, a spiked choker, black latex bodysuit and red thigh-high heels emerges, stomping over him as he cowers beneath her.

Other NFTs came in the form of photographs, such as three works by artist Steve Sweatpants. The three black-and-white photographs depict Black New Yorkers in moments of unity, protest and joy. Prior to Dreamverse, each had been exhibited in physical form elsewhere. “Blinked my eyes 2 times & ended up in the gulag” was published in “GQ,” “Curfew” is in the permanent collection at the Museum of the City of New York and “I can’t wait to go outside” will be part of a photography trading card pack from Sweatpants’ digital magazine “Street Dreams.”

Sweatpants said the difference between presenting his work in the physical world versus the digital is a matter of accessibility between the artist and viewer. “It's just a whole different level of communication with the art,” he said.

“NFTs are at a bubbling point and NFT.NYC was something that's going to be spoken about for a long time because [of] all these things that transpired, especially at the Dreamverse event,” said Sweatpants. “It's really putting all of these different artists from different disciplines in the same space with the new medium to make them all still connected in an odd way. So, I feel like it's showing connectivity on a level that we really hadn't experienced before.”

Enter the Metaverse

Not all of Dreamverse’s cryptoart was displayed on the walls. A row of virtual reality booths on the second floor allowed visitors to interact with the NFTs in a digital gallery. After donning a headset, participants navigated a black room through buttons on hand-held controllers. Most of the NFTs were simply on more screens inside of the virtual room, but John Orion Young’s “Power Flower” provided the most unique experience. The towering, Transformer-like figure is constructed in neon hues with vines creeping over it like veins. Flowers sprout from its shoulders and adorn major joints. Unlike the others, this NFT could be circled and seen three-dimensionally.

“I think if this was strictly a room with nothing but screens, it wouldn't have worked,” said Eric Wielander, Eventique’s event strategist and producer of Dreamverse. “But it works because there's music, there’s live painters, there's also VR immersion. We're giving people numerous little tentacles to play with. Other people were just holding galleries during NFT.NYC with a half-dozen screens. That's not really exciting.”

Another digital experience that attempted to bridge worlds was an augmented reality room by Jadu, a Pokémon Go-esque scavenger hunt app that lets users command avatars on their phones to explore the world and collect mint-able NFTs. The project is still in development, so the Dreamverse experience allowed gallery-goers to be filmed interacting with premade avatars in a white-walled room.

“Everyone's an artist,” said David. “If we can help them realize that they can view their 360-degree world in a different way, they're going to be more true to themselves. It's not just art ... watching talent come to life and seeing people merge their own vision of what the world is together with other people’s—to me is the true metaverse.”

The party

Dreamverse closed its doors in the late afternoon to transform into its main event: a dance club-like party featuring top-tier DJs like Eli Escobar, Stretch Armstrong and Alesso, who unveiled his own collection of NFTs, “Cosmic Genesis,” during his set.

The tubelight gallery was cleared from the dance floor to make way for partiers, who squeezed in tight for a show of technological wonder, chiefly Beeple’s “Everydays: The First 5000 Days.” 

“The biggest challenge was how to make Beeple’s ‘Everydays’ actually be a headlining act,” said Wielander. “We had to work through how to take a work of art and make it into a performance on a stage.”

Original pitches when Metapurse first called Eventique involved constructing a multi-story monument to Beeple’s iconic work that viewers could explore on moving lifts. The Eventique team harnessed the ambition of their client’s idea while nixing the potentially-dangerous aspect of hoisting people into the air. The result was a projection that stretched across the entire three-story wall of Terminal 5’s stage.

It began as a block made up of all 5,000 images Beeple created for the piece and then zoomed in and glided over each, occasionally pausing to allow viewers to absorb pictures of Buzz Lightyear with breasts, Yoda spewing blood from his mouth and various animations of babies. When the showing ended, the crowd’s cheers were deafening as Beeple took the stage and delivered a terse speech: “Nobody told me we were saying stuff.”

“[Beeple] created something that he had no mind to what anybody thought about what he was creating," said David. "This was his journey, but it was alone. If we can bring all these people together and have them create something that can only live for that moment, that's what I'm looking for. It's not just about what we can do to show off, we need the people who attend to be part of that vision.”

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