# Nico Shi** Art

- Channel: [Edge City](https://streameth.org/edge_city)
- Date: 2024-10-15
- Duration: 07:48
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/670e4c0b50c4a85480bf8eae
- Download: https://vod-cdn.lp-playback.studio/raw/jxf4iblf6wlsyor6526t4tcmtmqa/catalyst-vod-com/hls/b12566v2pulvywmz/720p0.mp4

## Transcript

My name is Nico. I actually have a lot of overlaps with Heather. I'm also an XR artist and with a background in game development. And I also love making music. So just to keep this short, I would like to play a reel which features all my work. And I also made the background music. Let's see if it... Thank you. Hallelujah. Hallelujah. you you you you Thank you. Zero. So that was then a collective of all my work, including game development, visual development, world building, and everything in between. For the past few years, I've been kind of navigating towards some things that's outside of what I know in the world of XR. So I've kicked off and kind of a research project exploring solar pump communities at the intersection of art ecology and technology. Art ecology and technology. So I've been kind of visiting intentional communities, researching them and discovering different ways for application of a lot of the ideas that fascinated me in virtual worlds. So I can go on forever, but I don't want to take too much time. But the idea is that I have this background in XR, and I really love building virtual world and imagine these kind of things that don't exist yet, but I also spend enough time kind of being on the ground and exploring these different super out there kind of communities and see what they represent, trying to get inspiration from them to be more, to be incorporated into the virtual world. And currently I'm focusing on making a bridge between these two worlds of real-life solarpunk communities and the imaginative virtual world which leads to my project here at Edge. And it's a project that started at the last Edge Esmeralda during the Mona Hackathon hosted by Justin and it's a VR game about animals and plants and how they can coexist in harmony through the playful act of art and music, mostly music. So right now I am working on kind of the first version of the prototype, which allows you to bring elements from nature like plants and animals and turn them into instruments and see how you can create kind of like a cohesive ecosystem with a cohesive soundscape. And this is a little demo of what I have so far, what I've been working on the past few months. Yeah, so basically there's an archive of plants that you can choose from and then you can turn them into sequencers with different kind of sounds. Thank you. Yeah, so the idea of this project is to bring all my passion and interest about nature, solar punk lifestyle ideologies, and music and XR into one space. So these beautiful things can have a home to live together. And for the goal here at Edge is to finish this project, actually launch it on the store. And the next step is that I would like to integrate with Monoverse in a deeper level where we can download 3D NFTs from Monoverse mostly and to turn them into actually musical instruments. So the idea is that all the Monoverse has created this really great standard for our 3D NFTs that allows them to be downloaded into game engines like Unity, which is what I use, as GLB files, and then I can use these 3D assets and give them custom sounds to turn them into custom instruments. So I am working on this integration. It's almost finished, but I will need a few more days to actually polish it. And I would love to invite artists and musicians here who also are interested in creating art and music to join. If they want to put some 3D assets as NFTs on Mona, I will be happy to integrate them into the game. And I would also like to launch some 3D NFTs into Mona as part of my goal for this residency. So that's it for now. Thank you.