“I’m interested in exploring other dimensions of reality to expand my understanding of this one. I want to give others the opportunity to do that too.”
Tom Sachs is an architect of worlds. With the right tools, he believes you are too. Located in Lower Manhattan, Sachs’ studio is an example of his masterly universe-building.
Walking through the space, everything has the feeling it’s been built by hand without being ‘DIY’. The objects of the studio aren’t hastily constructed clutter but hand-crafted art that tests and iterates different intricacies from the last attempt. The progressive growth is apparent as your eyes move around.
“All we do here is make worlds,” Sachs points out as he starts flipping through art books, highlighting the racetrack of his Deutsche Guggenheim exhibit. “The Space Program, or Tea Ceremony, or Rocket Factory, it’s all we do here.”
Rocket Factory, or more fully Tom Sachs Rocket Factory (TSRF), is an NFT project that brought the familiar physical activations of Sachs' world-building process into the metaverse.
“In the beginning, we just made rockets, but then it slowly grew organically based on the work we’ve been doing here for many years,” Sachs notes on the origin story of TSRF. “I’m not secretive about the future, it’s just uncertain. It will probably change, but I know it will always share the values of our other projects. That’s what keeps us honest. If we had some master plan, I probably wouldn’t care.”
As Sachs relays, the beginning of TSRF was all about the rockets. His team minted 1,000 rockets with 3,000 different components from 30 different brands, which defined the NFT's rarity; the NFTs also come in two different variations: a perfect rocket (where the rockets’ components have matching brands) or a frankenrocket (where the rockets’ components is a mix and match of brands).
The NFTs came with physical versions of the rockets, which Sachs’ team invited all the owners to launch with him IRL. Bringing his collectors together in a memorable way, nearly every owner has participated in a rocket launch. In addition to the rockets, TSRF also has released NFTs of Mothership tickets and Mars rocks, which are all in preparation for his digital metaverse: The Final Frontier.
Unveiled during NFT Paris, The Final Frontier is built on the 3D world-building platform Mona, featuring 1,000 3D planets, as well as 10,000 space station apartments that hover between worlds. In addition to the digital unveil, Sachs' team will have physical works (including a life-size rocket) on display, as well as an intake audit for curating a collector's space in the metaverse. For Highsnobiety's apartment, our intake included a deep breathing exercise and a selection of shapes (to which my tastes were "wildly consistent").\
Previews of the metaverse feature landscapes that range from familiar settings of natural creeks to sci-fi fantasy of space stations. The amount of depth that went into these worlds was far away from the often physically tangible Sachs builds.
“I don’t like the machine.” he laughs, “Master Yoda says fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering. So, when I say I hate something, It’s just that I don’t understand it. There’s an opportunity to learn.”
For Sachs, The Final Frontier’s learning process leaned heavily on storytelling.
“I’m not great at coding, but I’m really good at selecting things from the world and combining them to make a new world,” Sachs recalls, “It was so much fun doing the brands and graphics for a thousand rockets. Like, that’s writing poetry. And when they all get together, it becomes a story. For the 1,000 planets and 10,000 apartments, I don’t see it as work. It’s an opportunity for more storytelling, which is something to relish. It’s the thing I can do best.”
In many ways, Rocket Factory’s The Final Frontier feels like a direct continuation of Sachs’ other works, particularly, Space Program. In asking if the worlds built in The Final Frontier were something Sachs had in mind long before “NFT” entered his vocabulary, he says that “his science and science fiction are the same thing.”
“The only difference between the Death Star and the International Space Station is that everyone knows what the Death Star is.” he laughs, “So, I’ve been studying this stuff my whole life. It was very organic. People often ask ‘How long did it take you to think of these projects?’. This literally took a fraction of a second to think up, but a year and a half to execute.”
Throughout our conversation, the benchmark for a metaverse that was mentioned several times was Rockstar Game’s cult hit, Grand Theft Auto.
“The world of GTA 5 has been so inspirational for how you can tell a story, the way movies used to. I think The Final Frontier will help us have a different storytelling experience about how we identify ourselves through the things we consume; simultaneously, we don’t need to be defined by our occupations. Everyone’s an artist.”
When Sachs says everyone’s an artist, it doesn’t come off as some corny cop-out. Rather, our ability to get better at describing and articulating the world around us is what makes us artists to begin with. As “The Final Frontier” has always been a euphemism for the unknown, perhaps that's what Sachs is inviting us to explore too.
“I think artists thrive in a state of uncertainty. Our job is to provide a sense of adventure through the uncertain. If someone’s already done it, then the only reason to do it would be for money. That’s what culture's about, the discoveries, the ups, the downs, and the failures.”
