Image: Artist Colin Goldberg with his Augmented Reality Artwork Kneeling Icon at Hearst Tower in New York City in 2024.

Metagraphs:
A Journey Through Time

Colin Goldberg's Metagraphs collection began as as a series of vector-based digital drawings created with Adobe Illustrator in 1999 while the artist was living and working in a small studio on Avenue A in Manhattan’s East Village. During this time, Goldberg supported his studio as a freelancer, designing and coding some of the web’s first sites for brands such as Snapple, Merrill Lynch and Popular Science.

Unlike bitmap graphics, such as JPGs, which define an image in a grid of pixels, vector graphics define images mathematically in code, allowing them to be resolution-independent.  Vector art is the industry standard for applications such as logo design and corporate communications.  Goldberg learned how to use  these tools through his experience as a freelance artist at NYC ad agencies in the 1990's.  In the evenings, he explored these tools to create experimental abstract art.

Over two decades later, in 2021, Goldberg began animating these Metagraph drawings and minting them to the Ethereum blockchain as 23-second audiovisual NFTs.  The following year, Goldberg merged the original drawings with the NFTs as augmented reality works activated with the Artivive augmented reality app.

Goldberg's first AR piece, Kneeling Icon, pictured above, was fabricated as a 6x8 foot digital print on vinyl in the exhibition Techspressionism: Digital and Beyond at the Southampton Arts Center in Southampton, NY.  In 2023, Kneeling Icon was  exhibited in NYC's Hearst Tower in an exhibition in called Art Now, opposite a large sculpture by the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei.   At the close of the exhibition, the piece was purchased by the Hearst Corporation and is the first augmented reality in their permanent collection.  This piece was is now permanently installed in the company’s corporate headquarters in Manhattan’s Hearst Tower on 57th Street in NYC.  This piece has now made available for purchase as open-edition augmented reality art prints on paper, canvas, and aluminum. 

In 2023, Goldberg published Metagraphs: Augmented Reality Art, the first augmented reality artist book on Amazon.  This is a groundbreaking artist book in which the artworks animate directly on the book's pages when viewed with the Artivive app.  Metagraphs: Augmented Reality Art is available in hardcover and paperback editions on Amazon.