WEB3 PRODUCER + ARTIST
// VIRTUAL EXPERIENCE
Bay Backner (b. 1981, Burnley, UK) is a web3 producer and artist. She works with metaverse installation, immersive technologies and, often, oil paint, to produce shared virtual experiences. Bay is founder and director of MESHfair, the art fair for 3D, metaverse and VR creators, and co-founder of Vueltta, an international art collective producing immersive installations in the Decentraland metaverse. She is the curator of Metaverse Art Week 2023 and the producer of Decentraland Music Festival.
Bay’s work explores how shared virtual experience will shape society and identity. Her installations have been seen in Vanity Fair, Dazed, Vogue, WWD and Architectural Digest magazines, and featured by Metaverse Art Week, NFT Show Europe, and CNN.
Notable works include DEAR VIVIENNE, the Metaverse Fashion Week 2023 tribute to Vivienne Westwood; REFUGE, the metaverse exhibition which raised over $28000 for Ukraine; and MUSES 2, which was likely to have been the first performance art piece in the metaverse, produced for Miami Art Week and The Royal House of Medici.
Bay is Assistant Professor in Emerging Technologies for Berklee Valencia’s MA program in Global Entertainment. She regularly speaks on virtual experience, metaverse and spatial internet.
Bay holds a degree in Physics from Oxford University and accreditations from Canterbury Christ Church University, The National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian Institution.
ARTWORKS ON digital and sociocultural identities
The theme of digital identity vs sociocultural identity is central to Bay’s own artworks. Her pieces use oil paint and metaverse installation to pull cultural archetypes into an exploratory space between physical and digital worlds. In her ongoing body of work on the muse, she paints real-life portraits of ‘muses’ – women she has generated using AI technology – then disrupts their image through digital-physical interventions. For Bay, this is a necessary disruption of her own relationship to the muse-artist narrative.
Bay spent seven years studying the techniques of the Renaissance painters, above all their use of chiaroscuro. Most of her artworks begin classically, as real-life oil paint on canvas, before they are developed into digital installations. Her physical artworks have exhibited at London Fashion Week, New York Fashion Week and in galleries in London and Europe.
Decentralized technologies and NFTs
Bay has been active in decentralized technology since 2006, when she produced the first conference on open source mobile software in Silicon Valley. She still regularly consults on metaverse and web3 growth strategy for brands including DeFi ICOs, NFT platforms, social protocols and decentralised social enterprise. Bay both creates and collects NFTs on the Tezos and Polygon chains. As a collector, she focuses on emerging women artists, and her own work was selected for the Women’s Museum’s genesis NFT collection.
“Meet the anti-scroll model….Bay Backner.”
— Grazia Magazine
“Bay has an uncommon affinity and flair with paint. Very impressive.”
— Peter Duggan, Author, Artoons
BAY BACKNER 