"Human beings are experiencing unprecedented upheavals in the multipolar game, one pole is the power of human flesh in the physical world, the other pole is the power of the virtual world of digital technology, and the other pole is the inner force of human rationality and morality. With the ongoing outbreak of the new crown epidemic, the outbreak of war in Ukraine, and the tragic air disaster, we seem to have never felt as close to us as non-human beings are to us, and how human life is so fragile; how the application of information-based military technology created by human beings themselves has exacerbated the great turmoil, great differentiation, and great reorganization of the world's politics-economy-society, and the trust between people is also facing an increasing crisis. Today, we realize that humanity has unexpectedly entered the metaverse, a mixture of virtual and real, and the indistinguishable realism of virtual reality. ”
In the recent forum "Zhenxia Qiyuan: The Illusion of Reality and Virtual Reality", the initiator of this forum, Professor Liu Xiaoli, Professor of the School of Philosophy of Chinese University and Scholar of Bogurui, talked about it.
The forum was jointly organized by the Bogurui Research Center of Peking University, the School of Philosophy of Chinese University, the Interdisciplinary Platform of Philosophy and Cognitive Science of Chinese University, and Server Art. At the forum, 19 guests from industry, science, philosophy and art, including Zhu Jiaming, He Zhan, Zhai Zhenming and Wang Xing, respectively, gave a speech entitled "The 'Pioneering And Expanding the Territory' of New Species and New Civilization?" The underlying technology of the metaverse and the imagination of the future scenario", "The Digital Age and Creativity: Crypto Art Practice in 2021", "The New Generation of Human Cognition: Virtual Reality and the Ethics of Creation", and "The Sharing Meeting of The 'Pioneers' of the Digital Natives and Metaverses" were discussed.
Forum site
The "frontier expansion" of new species and new civilizations?
In 2021, the most controversial and imaginative concept of space is the metacosm. From a technical point of view, what are the underlying technologies that support the development of the metacosm? How far is there from the metaverse landing application? What are the application scenarios in the future?
Sub-forum "New Species and New Civilization's 'Frontier Expansion'? In the "Imagination of the Underlying Technology and Future Scenarios of the Metaverse", Professor Zhu Jiaming, Doctor of Economics, Professor, and Chairman of the Academic and Technical Committee of the Hengqin Digital Chain Digital Finance Research Institute, gave a speech entitled "Metacosm: Revolutionary Choices in the Era of Great Human Transformation", and he believes that our human history has probably undergone three major historical transformations: the Axial Era, the Renaissance Era, and the Industrial Revolution Era. The causes of the transition are analysed from the economic, social, political, ideological and cultural aspects.
Zhu Jiaming believes that 22 years have passed since the 21st century, the population size and economic volume of our era are huge, and the crisis has become normalized, complex, high-frequency, and global. "In an increasingly powerful system, an increasingly integrated technology, an increasingly quantitative society, we are increasingly unaware of where the real coordinate system of the world is, and if we let it develop, we are facing disorder, division, and collapse." So there are two models, one is the 'Musk model', which I define as the 'interstellar capitalist model' - the earth is not working, we need to find a way to go to the alien planet, the flesh can not go, but also let people's information, genes pass; the other is the 'metaverse model' - to build a virtual reality world. Among them, the 'Musk model' relies on capital, relies on the traditional corporate power, and needs to use capital + technology + company to complete a migration and transformation in human history, and the metacosm is the DAO model. The earth and human beings cannot bear the costs and consequences of trial and error, problems that cannot be solved in the real world, and need to be experimented with in a new world, and the metacosm is a revolutionary solution and method. ”
He Zhan, head of Omniverse in Nvidia China, said that the fusion of computer vision, AI and deep learning, VR, AR, XR technology, physical simulation technology and super computing power will help everyone to create their own digital works and digital worlds. He Zhan believes: "From the perspective of technology, the development of AI digital people can be divided into three stages: the 1.0 era has achieved film and television level hyper-realism, AI face-changing, etc., which has gradually moved towards maturity; the 2.0 era can achieve AI generation hyper-realism, AI real-time drive 3D hyper-realistic digital people; the dream of the 3.0 era is to realize the iteration of artistic needs, AI digital people can achieve AI-enabled character training, low-code no-code construction, and digital people who support the combination of virtual and real interaction. ”
Chen Xu, founder of Meta Z, a metacosmic and future asset research think tank, tried to answer the question of what is the meaning of the metacosm around "Metacosm: The Road to Liberation of Human Identity". Is it just an extension of reality? Just a bigger, better internet? Chen Xu believes that the important criterion of the metaverse is "identity". Before modern times, identity was a privilege. Since modernization, the state has given people an important commitment, that everyone has an identity, that we work for it, that we benefit from it, and that we are subject to it. In the future, identity is an asset.
We will notice that in the metaverse, a very important infrastructure is a non-homogeneous token built on the blockchain, that is, an NFT, and the corresponding file, whether it is video, audio, or picture, will become a very important infrastructure in the metaverse. This avatar of the NFT will become the identity of you, and this identity will become an important entrance to your metaverse. There are many avatars in the metaverse now, which may be a skeleton elf, may be a hamster, or may become a pet, and when you buy an NFT, you become an electronic resident of the "community". Future humans will construct their digital identities in the metaverse, and their digital identities will be recognized by society earlier than their offline physical identities, so before he himself has been exposed to a lot of personal information, the metaverse has already allocated assets according to its digital identities.
Ape NFT
As a result, identity, value, and experience are considered by Chen Xu to be the three elements of the metacosm. Part of the value is to build its own economic system in the metaverse, but the most important thing is identity. If the individual cannot establish multiple identities in the metaverse according to his needs, to whom do all the economic elements of metacosmic expansion belong? Who belongs to the data formed in the metaverse? Only when the identity of the individual is developed does the metacosm have its legitimacy in the history of individual development.
During the dialogue session, Lecturer Zhan Yiwen of the School of Philosophy of Beijing Normal University continued to discuss with three speakers. Teacher Zhan Yiwen began by mentioning a view of the philosopher Zhao Tingyang: in modern society and the digital age, people's identities are originally pluralistic, but will the arbitrariness of the metaverse's identity superposition bring about the loss of subjectivity or arbitrary division?
Chen Xu responded that from a certain point of view, the entire history of human civilization progress has made individuals more vulnerable to falling into some kind of spiritual dilemma. If the experience and cognition of the pluralistic self depends only on the ability of the individual to use the tools of language and writing, and is only based on the development of the individual's knowledge and thinking ability, it may forever stay in the endowment or advantage of a few people, but the application of subversive technology in the metaverse allows everyone to try this evolutionary process, so that everyone can independently isolate a certain sub-personality and a certain tendency of the self, and promote its growth.
NFT Narrative and Orthodox Art History
Following on the topic of discussion in the previous forum, in the technical application section of blockchain, digital artworks are transformed into monetized cryptographic art due to the combination of NFTs (non-homogeneous tokens). The history of the development of crypto art is not long, but the recent explosive development trend in transactions, how is crypto art developing in 2021, and what are the latest developments?
Crypto artist and initiator of digital compound Wang Xing shared five keywords entitled "Digital Age and Creativity: Crypto Art Practice in 2021" and shared it in five keywords: CG, Avatar, Conceptual Art, Financial Engineering, and Crypto Native. Wang Xing believes that the accumulation of resources in the CG industry can help the blockchain industry break through, but CG, as a thing born out of practical art, does not have as many humanistic connotations as contemporary art, and in most cases does not have the potential to be interpreted layer by layer. Therefore, the industry is constantly looking for hot spots, and in 2017, avatars appeared, and two of the most famous avatar projects, one is Punk and the other is boring ape, and now both projects have confirmed their head status.
"The avatar project answers why crypto native is a new thing and what it has to do with coin people; the early influential case of conceptual art is Lot, which represents the beginning of crypto art to get rid of the fine art category; financial engineering is used to describe Pak's work, which is a distillation of a unique artistic language of blockchain, from which we begin to see the necessity of blockchain technology applied to crypto art; crypto native is the creative direction we have always wanted to practice." That is, using blockchain technology as an artistic language and expressing the humanistic connotation of blockchain at the same time, art may have a way to express it indirectly, and art may have a more tolerant participation environment. Wang Xing said.
Yuan Yuan, an independent documentary filmmaker, artist and critic of contemporary art photography, first proposed two cases, the first is that the NFT artist Beeple, who set a record of $69 million, has just held an offline exhibition showing traditional paintings and printed works; and some people who have benefited from cryptocurrencies and NFTs have spent huge sums of money to collect materialized works of art, such as Picasso's paintings and Giacometti's sculptures, which bridge the gap between the virtual world and the real world. Or a repudiation of crypto art? At the same time, it is explained that without Bitcoin, there is no blockchain, there is no NFT and crypto art now, the key to understanding crypto native is not blockchain technology, but the crypto native meaning of Bitcoin, which challenges the legal tender mechanism of the national monopoly that has continued since the 7th century BC to the present, so when we talk about crypto native art, we are talking about changing the concepts and practices of the real world, not the application of blockchain technology.
Works by crypto artist Beeple
Guo Cheng, editor-in-chief of the Crypto Art Yearbook and co-founder of Digital Compounds, responded that the emergence of Loot has evolved from the pursuit of vision to the expression of abstract ideas. But we can't get rid of the real body, so the texture of the entity is still important for offline exhibitions. Art and blockchain practitioners try to reconcile with each other, both trying to integrate NFT narratives into the threads of orthodox art history.
Wang Bo, founder of Nervina Labs, believes that in the crypto world, speculation or market behavior is often an act of price discovery, and we can't have no value because this thing can't be understood. For example, "Beeple"'s American artist Mike Winkelman's digital work "Every Day: 5000 Days" sold for nearly $70 million, which also appeared because Beeple had a large number of fans before the auction, which to some extent represented the current situation of the fan economy, migrating from Ins to the blockchain community, and the social relationship between Beeple's former fans and audiences and his history was moved. Crypto art actually creates a cross-domain, cross-temporal connection. It is a community, a culture, an attraction.
The so-called metacosm, a popular saying is the use of digital technology to create a virtual world of digital living space that maps and interacts with the real world. With the development of virtual reality technology, real life will likely become more and more dependent on virtual life based on network and virtual reality technology, and even to a considerable extent replaced by the latter. Virtual reality technology is not only a research practice in the field of science and technology, but also an exploratory experiment at the level of social ethics, and the relationship between people will be reshaped, and we also have to face the impact of virtual reality on social ethics.
Duan Yongchao, founding partner of Reed Grass Zhiku, gave a keynote speech entitled "Metaverses: The Last Feast of the Old World", in which he believed that the current metaversm has three characteristics: enclosure, harvesting, and foam, and three misunderstandings: metaverse technology is equivalent to VR; metaverse application is equivalent to game/simulation/digital art experience; and simply consider the metacosm to be a new round of business opportunities. Duan Yongchao believes that we should re-understand the metaverse from the three dimensions of "perception", "imagination" and "order". Deep thinking about the metacosm, not only from the perspective of the reconstruction of the world system and order, but also from the level of technological internalization in people's cognitive ascension, will be an interweaving and interaction of academic thought and industrial development and social construction.
Zhu Rui, a professor at the School of Philosophy at Chinese Min University, believes that when we discuss the metacosm, we should learn from Kant. For when Kant discusses knowledge, he first asks, "How is knowledge possible?" What is actually asked is "What is impossible with knowledge?" There is no problem that the CG and objects produced by the metacosm can be seen as real from the perspective of the object. But if we're going to think of the metaverse as another "world," there's a long technical leap to be made.
In the "Digital Natives and Metaversmic 'Pioneers' Sharing Meeting", the participating scholars believe that there is an asymmetry between the virtual world and the real world, and that everything in the virtual world acts on neurons, while the real world acts on the entire physical body. The metacosm acts entirely on neurons, which also constitutes an asymmetry, which may also be a hidden worry of the metacosm and the virtual world. In the game, we also see a trend, the latest and hottest concept is not virtual reality (VR) but AR (augmented reality), so if there is a metaverse in the future, it will not be a pure virtual space thing, but a combination of virtual space and real space.
Contemporary artist Chestnut said from her own experience of playing games that the more realistic the path of the game, the greater its popularity. But in some metaverse scenarios, such as simulating eating ramen and simulating a kitchen, what is the point? In fact, there is no meaning, it is boring, there is no creativity, it has completely become technical control, just like we paint, not for the sake of painting, but what special consciousness I want to express.