Metakovan Opens Art and Technology Space in Singapore

The collector and blockchain architect Vignesh Sundaresan, also known as Metakovan, has opened a new art and technology space, Padimai Art and Tech Studio, in Singapore.

Sundaresan, who caused a global stir in April 2021 when he paid $69.3m worth of Ethereum cryptocurrency (with fees) at a Christie’s auction for Beeple’s NFT Everydays: The First 5000 Days (2021), transforming the market for crypto art, has opened the new space with Olafur Eliasson’s Your view matter (2022/2025). Sundaresan commissioned the virtual reality (VR) work from the Danish-Icelandic artist in 2022. (Beeple was again the subject of global interest in early December 2025 when his Regular Animals (2025), robot dogs bearing life-size waxwork faces of tech moguls and celebrity artists, caused a media sensation at the Zero 10 section of Art Basel Miami Beach.)

“Padimai Art and Tech Studio Is a space for experimenting and exploring the intersection between art and technology,” Sundaresan said in a launch statement. “And specifically to inquire about the present digital culture.”

“We want to invite artists, researchers and visitors, and the public, to come and to think about digital culture [...] and question, and work through, how this medium could evolve.” (Vignesh Sundaresan)

The opening of the new space comes in the lead-up to Art SG (January 23 to 25, 2026), Singapore’s annual art fair. In 2025, Art SG featured a broad range of digital art shown by galleries including Gazelli Art House and TAEX, from London, Office Impart, of Berlin, and The Columns, of Seoul and Singapore. The artists exhibited included William Latham, Libby Heaney, Xin Liu (& Nan Zhao), Entangled Others, Tamiko Thiel, Jan Robert Leegte, and Jonas Lund.

Padimai Art and Tech Studio is based in the Tanjong Pagar Distripark, close to Singapore Art Museum (organizers of the Singapore Biennale 2025) and a number of commercial galleries.‍

Your view matter was developed with Acute Art and launched in September 2022, minted as an NFT on Polkadot, before being shown at “Nel tuo tempo”, Eliasson’s survey exhibition at Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, later in the same year.

For Your view matter, VR headsets hang from the studio’s ceiling in an arc. Each user journey in the headset generates a data file that records the user’s “trajectory and perspective”, according to a press statement. These data files are preserved, the statement says, in a blockchain-based archive conceived by Sundaresan, “a decentralised, physically stored system capable of ‘playing back and playing forward’ every recorded journey while maintaining the exact digital state of the artwork.”

The user in Your view matter moves between geometric spaces based on the Platonic solids, the tetrahedron, octahedron, icosahedron, dodecahedron, and cube, before concluding in a sphere. For Eliasson, VR comes alive when the experience is generated by a user’s movement, and his Platonic spaces display a moiré effect that is “disturbed” by the user’s head movement.

“I made a deconstructed element,” the artist said in a launch statement. “The idea of noise; cosmic noise, if you want. The moiré. Every computer is trying to prevent moiré. I like this noise, this contamination. That became a part of the piece.”

“It is almost deconstructing the headset itself. I want it to be a deliberate opportunity for you to evaluate [...] what does it mean to be in this other world.” (Olafur Eliasson)

“This means there is something about the way you move that constitutes the piece,” Eliasson said. “You will see something nobody else will see. The way you move your head is highly individual.”

Eliasson, whose internationally exhibited installation work deals with nature and the human impact on it, and warning about the global climate emergency, has been working with VR since 2016, with a particular interest in how humans move in virtual space. In an interview published in The Art Newspaper at the time of Your view matter’s launch in 2022, he cited the academic laboratory, rather than commercial VR, as his primary inspiration in the format, with particular reference to the work of Joe Dumit, professor of anthropology and science & technology studies at the University of California, Davis, and Natasha Myers, an associate professor of anthropology at York University.

Thinkers like Dumit and Myers, Eliasson said in 2022, concerned with how human beings move and feel in space, are among the people “that make me face forward to the future [of the planet]. That we are not going to be OK. But if there were more people like this generation we might just make it.”