SR Interview with Sven Eberwein: the Digital Zeitgeist

I vividly remember the first time I opened up Maya in my early teenage years. I had seen a video on YouTube where somebody had build a 3D Model and replaced it with an existing one in GTA Vice City. I didn’t know how, but I knew, I wanted to do the same. Ever since, the creative application of software has been my life.

Today I live in Los Angeles and use the knowledge I acquired over the last 10+ years to create art and to help design Cars at Tesla. It’s a great place to be if you want exposure to art, technology and emerging pop-cultural trends rooted in both the digital & the analog world.

The first time I heard about crypto art was at Burning Man, 2019. I was part of a group building an art installation and so I meet Sky. He was familiar with my digital works and explained me the process of tokenization and the ERC-721 standard. I immediately fell in love with the idea, since I was into crypto already, but haven’t had connected the dots yet.

After doing art in the crypto space for one year there is a lot I have learned and even more inspiration for the future!

I make Art for the Internet. 

Paramount to all my work is to be at the forefront of digital culture & technology. I want to capture a fraction of the digital Zeitgeist and preserve it in a tokenized GIF that will live forever. A bit wonky, a bit quirky but actually with a deeper meaning and a cultural context rooted somewhere in the world-wide-web.

A lot of times a work starts with a Meme. I see it, I tinker with it for a while and sometimes it triggers a creative process that takes me somewhere I haven’t been before. My favorite character is Meme Man, he is capturing the Meme-Culture like no one else out there. Memes in general are fascinating, they are some sort of new, visual 21^st century language. They are bottom up, not top down. They originate and evolve organically. They are funny, impactful, easy to create and easy to share. Are they art? I don’t think so but they certainly inspire artists to create.

Some thoughts about crypto art more generally. It’s a new medium with new rules, new artists, new collectors and a new audience. The concept of digital value and ownership is key to understand the fundamental relevance of tokenized art and how it will manifest itself into the future art world. Every time I read one of the “Right Click – Save as” Tweets I smile a little and get excited about being ahead of the curve.

The fact that not a lot of people understand or care about crypto art today is actually one of the core reason I’m attracted to it. It’s a green field opportunity that comes around maybe once a decade. 

I search for narratives in the digital world and cast them into a visual experience. Descriptive and precise for a small audience, wonky and absurd for pretty much everyone else. I like to think that my works are a bit like puzzles you can solve by diving deep into the Internet.

It’s not all fun though, I also try to work around deeper rooted issues young people are facing today. Millennials are coming of age in an era of economic uncertainty. As a Generation, we are on a trajectory to unlikely match the economic success of our parents. The catalyst for that is Stonks, Wall Street Bets & Money Printer go Brrrrrr. The Supreme X Federal Reserve Series or Stonks are Inflated illustrate different angles of this emerging millennial wealth gap.

But there is Hope! I believe the Internet and decentralized networks can make a meaningful contribution to solve many of these issues. Young people are taking back the Internet and create value within the communities they are building. The wealth gap won’t get bridged with Tendies but there is clearly something to discover here.

This is where I want to stand with my art. Looking with confidence towards a better future is absolutely essential.

One of my favorite motives is the generic Human Figurine I developed initially for the Bubble People Series on zazCorner / Times Square.  To me it is a Symbol for a Human, defined by his conciseness, not his appearance. If the body is not present you are purely defined by what is going through your mind.  To me, it is a new concept of perceiving the human existence, as we fuse more and more with technology. In Infinite Scroll I portrait a weak mind, stuck inside and endless social media feedback loop. EXCHANGE shows ideas that originate, travel and are absorbed freely. It’s a humble approach to depict the human mind.

The DeFi space is a fascinating place to be currently. It’s a bubble within a bubble attracting the smartest minds and the biggest egos in the space. There are stories of success, failure, forks and fraud. People make money and lose it. People have skin in the game and following along is captivating and entertaining. It is the digital wild-west.

One great example for that would be the $MEME project, it’s capturing the #DeFI / Meme Zeitgeist like nothing else out there and people have begun to notice its weird uniqueness. 

On first glance it looks like a big joke but as soon you look behind the curtains you will find brilliant ideas, backed by a well engineered infrastructure. The project is building a bridge between the DeFi and the NFT world. DeFi-degens are owning their first NFT and more intellectually driven NFT collectors dipping their toes in Yield Farming 

To me, as an Artist, the most interesting aspect about the merger of DeFi & NFTs is the introduction of Code and a whole new distribution model to Art. It’s like a new color in your paintbox and I believe, that at this point, we barely have seen the beginning of it. Moving forward the only limitation will be your imagination.