DeviantArt launched all the way back in 2000, creating an online community for amatuer and aspiring artists to share their work and communicate with another. The site became a hit long before social media became omnipresent, and proved to be a huge success for its founder, Angelo Sotira. A quarter of a century later, Sotira has revealed his current project, Layer.
Layer is designed to be an extremely high-end display for digital artwork. Sotira says that his team is working directly with hundreds of digital artists who are writing software designed to slowly change their artwork over time. Layer is not meant to be a consumer product, and its $22,000 price point will attest to that. This hefty price is due to the technology needed to run and display this kind of ever-evolving artwork, Sotira explains.
“You’re looking at an over 35-year history of extraordinary artists developing the medium of code-based art and essentially, the pixels on the display are being governed by the code that’s been written that runs live on that GPU, rendering it in full resolution,” Sotira told TechCrunch. “It’s actually controlling every pixel, so it’s not going through any compression algorithms.”
In addition to the display itself, Layer owners also receive access to artwork created by artists within the Layer ecosystem. These artists receive royalties based on how frequently their work is displayed, and for how long.
“They’re $22,000, so that kind of tells you a lot about who that’s for,” Sotira commented to TechCrunch. “We spared no expense and we spared no effort. We made no compromise in producing what is actually, in our opinion, the very best way to display digital art on a wall.”
