Reimagining Art Practice with UFO — Ivano Salonia

Ivano Salonia is the creative director of UFO, based in Amsterdam. An artist, musician and creator in extended realities and virtual worlds.

He is the artist behind the UFO poster art and NFTs. Since July 2022, Ivano and Nick Hollins have been creating the visual identity, art and brand of UFO. We went to ETH Tokyo in April and hacked on a UFO project with Lens Protocol and Livepeer. And we just built a website at ufo.fm ~ an onchain radio station and club for music, arts and ideas. This podcast is the first on the network.

We talk about Ivano’s artistic practice starting out in advertising, design and brand. Doing work with global companies and agencies. How he became interested in making art in virtual reality, and experiments with AI and generative tools such as Midjourney. Diving into the web3, crypto and NFTs space from 2020. Working on projects including the motorcycle art video game Night Run with Matto from Hypercastles, and designing the 3D records for the Metalabel Quality Drops.

We talk about his creative process and philosophy. About the creative scene in Amsterdam with many artists and musicians, technology projects, extended realities and VR. And the creation of the UFO art style and drops including UFO Genesis Pass and the Frequency Modulation release on Zora, remixing a retro MTV ad from the 1980s.

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Zerion combines every corner of web3 in a simple and intuitive app for self-custodial humans. Discover the hottest NFT collections, track your DeFi rewards, and vote in DAOs across 10+ chains. Get started at zerion.io

Lens Protocol is the open-source tech stack for building decentralized social media applications. A permissionless and transparent social graph that is owned by the user. Lens is the last social media handle you’ll ever need to create. Visit lens.xyz