un_MUSEUMs: The Culmination of MOCA ROOMs
The ROOMs Experiment
In 2022, from behind the brightest of rose-colored glasses, we offered MOCA ROOMs to the world. In our estimation, these interoperable 3D art galleries served a manifold purpose. They would:
- Encourage far greater participation in Metaverse spaces by providing actual use-cases therein,
- Further decentralize the overarching Museum ecosystem, beyond any bounds of curation and exhibition we — as a small team — were capable of
- Help sustain MOCA’s long-term efforts via consistent auctioned releases
Here’s some of what we wrote about ROOMs at the time they launched in February of 2022:
“Imagine standing at the inception of a new architectural era. Imagine spatial experiences built without the constraints of materiality, gravity, or weather. Architecture freed from itself, from all its former fetter.”
That poeticism really was a reflection of what was in our hearts. Here’s a bit more:
“ROOMs encourage architects to not only onboard into the Metaverse, but to collaborate with others outside the limitations of any single, specific Virtual World. ROOMs provide a perpetually-mutable 3D canvas wherein multiple creatives can interact endlessly and concurrently. An architect can (and should! And will!) work alongside interior designers, artists, musicians, and creative directors to build singularly-expressive, wholly-unique structures, to begin probing the Metaverse’s grandest possibilities.”
In our minds, by introducing the crypto art world to easy and accessible Metaverse exhibition, we would begin to see a huge influx of inspired creatives finding novel uses for these virtual worlds, new avenues for their artistry. ROOMs would be their central plaything, the totems of common spaces within which we would all gather to see and discuss crypto art. We envisioned sprawling Metaverse worlds where many individual ROOMs — each exhibiting a user-curated show of artworks from their own collections — would exist in ever-changing and organic environments, unpredictable crypto art rabbit holes wherein we would be able to literally watch our collective tastes evolve.
Despite our optimism, we were clearly too early in almost all of our highest-minded anticipations. Even today, that Metaverse has yet to come to fruition. But we were also not alone: MOCA sold 155 ROOMPasses from February 2022 to December 2023, and freely raffled-off over 60 bespoke ROOMs, creations designed by brilliant Metaverse architects like untitled,xyz, PolygonalMind, Manuel Mensa, Warrawag, DFW, and Walt. But the brief birth-and-death flash of Metaverse enthusiasm was almost entirely extinguished by the time the last ROOMPass sold. It became clear that ROOMs and ROOMPasses were being treated more as collectors items (no shade) than useful objects, with crypto art reticent to involve itself in a Metaverse with little participation, no hype, and few practical applications.
We also encountered a scale problem. We believed that a far larger population of Metaverse architects would sign-on to create our outstanding ROOMs, but the cavalry never came (for obvious reasons), and while we considered chaining untitled,xyz to a radiator and forcing him to design 100 more ROOMs by hand, he ultimately proved too slippery to capture. We chose instead to continue iterating internally. Our goal was not only to develop an answer to this issue of scale, but an answer that would be as worthwhile and exciting for ROOMPass holders as our early ROOMs were so clearly felt to be.
In the time since that last ROOMPass was minted, we found ourselves circling something quite grand, beyond aesthetic beauty and into the realm of historical significance. Something that could draw many attentions back to a Metaverse which stands on the precipice of its next great advancement.
We’re writing this piece not only to detail ROOMs’ next leap, and how it fulfills our obligation to ROOMPass holders, but to express the conceptual rigor, aesthetic brilliance, and developmental importance of what untitled,xyz has been concocting all this time.
The ironically named collection we have before us today — un_MUSEUMS — is not only a new plane in the continuum of MOCA’s ROOM ecosystem, but in the way we approach Metaverse spaces as a whole.
un_MUSEUMs, by untitled,xyz
By the time you’re reading this, we’ll have released our latest MOCA LIVE podcast episode, a conversation with the architect of un_MUSEUMs himself, untitled,xyz, about his creation process for what are among the first AI-generated 3D architectures in existence. For anyone familiar with untitled,xyz’s previous work, un_MUSEUMs must seem a radical departure, at least in form. Here you find none of the tight, straight lines you’re accustomed to, the cubes and blocks and other modular pieces that are his calling cards, nor the neon colors, the retrofuturistic details, the orbs and pillars and pyramids that especially characterized his earlier MOCA ROOMs, and which are fairly consistent throughout all of his minted work.
Instead, un_MUSEUMs bear more of a resemblance to Aaron Huey’s Radiolorians (microscopic fossils photographed with an electron microscope) than anything in untitled,xyzs oeuvre. These are oddly organic structures, storm-carved rock formations you might discover on a sun-bleached island somewhere, or coral deposits molded by unpredictable eons of undersea currents. They are curving and sloped in the way of sedimentary rocks at the bottom of rushing riverbeds, crushed into smoothness, dotted with vacuous hollows. They appear to have been created by some ineffable and intelligent design, and that’s because they have been. un_MUSEUMS are not only untitled,xyz’s first foray into AI-generated architecture, they are among the first examples of AI-generated 3D architecture, period.
(So we’re pretty psyched to be getting them into peoples’ hands).
Untitled,xyz calls un_MUSEUMs “a series of metaverse-ready AI-generated ROOMs created locally using a ComfyUI + TRELLIS workflow. Each 3D environment is a virtual habitat built for digital art to thrive beyond 2D apps and flat white walls…” For those paying attention, the death of metaverse skeuomorphism has been a priority of untitled,xyz’s for a long time. In 2022, we wrote, “If Metaverse architecture need no longer provide physical shelter or consider the physical needs of human beings, then what is it?” which reflects maybe a hundred conversations I’ve had with untitled,xyz about how ridiculous it is that Metaverse buildings have roofs (despite having no rain to keep out) or doors (who are you locking out?) or bathrooms. Bathrooms! The logical conclusion of untitled,xyz’s anti-skeuomorphism are metaverse architectures that could not exist in the physical world. The physics of un_MUSEUMs are impossible. We could never encounter/replicate the natural processes required to bring them to fruition. Wading through this collection is a profound experience in “I’ve never imagined anything like this before.”
Untitled,xyz worked using “TRELLIS — an incredibly powerful 3D asset generation model (MIT License) developed by Microsoft which can be used to translate prompt language and imagery into highly detailed and optimized 3D assets,” iterating for long periods of time to get the correct aesthetic, introducing the appropriate textures, and then fully AI-generating all the titles and descriptions “via each un_MUSEUM thumbnail rendering blended with architectural lore across the 1D-2D-3D creation process,” in collaboration with noted crypto artist and programmer (also MOCA benefactor and dear friend) DaïmAlYad. As we discuss on the podcast this week, TRELLIS is mostly used by game developers to create individual game assets that enrich a world; I think the examples untitled,xyz provided were treasure chests, hammers, things of that nature. To blow-out the scope of the tool, to create not just the decoration of internal spaces but the centerpieces, is a new way of approaching prompt-based 3D design.
Untitled,xyz has been personally reaching out to every current ROOMPass holder to ensure they receive an un_MUSEUM, and because MOCA remains the largest holder of ROOMPasses, we will have many of these structures on-hand for exhibitions, experimentations, and even giveaways. Trust me when I tell you this: to walk through a single un_MUSEUM is exhilarating, but to walk through many, one after another, is quite profound. You can see the future in them, the echelons of creativity AI is now capable of reaching, an omen of more than just AI-generated architectures, but environments, worlds, interoperabilities, plus all the people populating these spaces, AI looking-on in admiration of the structures it itself has erected.
ROOMs Going Forward
Don’t let the lack of headlines fool you, there is such a bounty of Metaverse innovation happening below attention’s surface that it might stagger you. The intractable obstacles to widespread metaverse adoption are being one-by-one invented away.
The problem of non-peopled Metaverse spaces? Solved by more and more lifelike AI agents. Ashxn, co-founder of Hyperfy, recently released a teaser of an ElizaOS AI agent that can travel between Hyperfy worlds at will. What about the relative difficulty of spinning-up Metaverse spaces? The upcoming release of HyperfyV2 — and other engines, I’m sure — will materially simplify the process of creating, beautifying, personalizing, and populating Metaverse spaces. We are all very much looking forward to more details as they become available.
Things that we’ve long-dreamt about are approaching full simplification. A MOCA Museum District full of all these ever-updating MOCA ROOMs in one place, that’s technologically on the horizon: a huge landless space bursting with as many polygons as we can stuff inside. As individual MOCA ROOMs — be they untitled,xyz’s early works, those created by our other ROOM architects, or un_MUSEUMs — are populated with artworks (because at their heart, ROOMs are meant to display digitally-native crypto artwork in digitally-native spaces), they will also populate into our Museum District, sprawling and mesmerizing and tailor-made to suck you into art exhibits featuring the kind of organic, unpredictable curation we could only in the past envision, and all of it populated by AI guides and personalities in the form of our Art DeCC0 Agents, which we are already hard at work on bringing to fruition.
un_MUSEUMs are another piece of the self-encircling whole: a smarter, more creative, more interactive Museum environment that preserves and teaches and enraptures, which can be used as a tool as much as it can be used as a place of self-expression. We are excited to send un_MUSEUMs out in the world, and we are thrilled to be taking another step forward, at long last, towards the future we laid out for ourselves long ago, which is so close now we are beginning to sniff its sweet scent.
