WEB3 ARTIST + PRODUCER // METAVERSE INSTALLATION
+ EXPERIENTIAL TECH {+ OIL PAINT}
Bay Backner (b. 1981, Burnley, UK) is a web3 artist and producer. She works with metaverse installation, experiential technologies and, often, oil paint. Bay is co-founder of Vueltta, an international art collective producing immersive installations in the Decentraland metaverse. She is also the founder and director of MESH, the art fair for 3D, metaverse and VR creators.
Bay uses oil paint and metaverse technology to reflect on identity between physical and digital worlds. Her work has been seen in Vanity Fair, Dazed, Vogue, WWD and Grazia magazines, and featured by Metaverse Art Week, NFT Show Europe, NFT Liverpool, ETH Barcelona and The Financial Times Digital Asset Summit.
Bay produced the metaverse exhibition REFUGE which raised over $28000 for Ukraine. Most recently, she created the world’s first performance art piece in the metaverse for Miami Art Week and The Royal House of Medici.
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. She regularly lectures in metaverse, DAOs and the spatial internet, most recently at UPV Valencia and Berklee College of Music. You can watch her NFT Show Europe 2022 presentation on four laws for metaverse creators here.
Between digital and sociocultural identities
The theme of digital identity vs sociocultural identity is central to Bay’s work. 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 