Renowned artist Mat Collishaw is breaking new ground with his latest project, Heterosis, which is centered around a unique NFT-based flower collection and a fully immersive metaverse experience. Created in collaboration with artist Danil Krivoruchko, snark.art, and EL-GABAL, the project is built on the og.art protocol by Snark.art.
The project comprises two primary elements: a breedable NFT flora collection and a virtual greenhouse that recreates London’s National Gallery in a post-apocalyptic, overgrown setting. Heterosis represents a radical departure from traditional art forms and experiments with a novel medium.
Collishaw explained that the goal is to create dynamic, evolving things that can be explored in virtual social system environments. He said, “things like this wouldn’t be possible in any other medium.”
Upon minting, each collector receives a unique Heterosis flower that has its own traits and DNA, which are determined based on the owner’s wallet’s content. Owners can participate in a hybridization game and become creators themselves, cross-breeding any two NFTs in the collection to generate new mutations, colors, and patterns, thereby creating entirely new and exotic digital flower species.
When a new hybrid is generated, owners can decide to either keep their current flower or replace it with the new one, ensuring that the collection’s total number of NFTs always remains the same. To hybridize, collectors must pay a fee to the owner of the second parent, with the price being determined by the collectors themselves, incentivizing the creation of increasingly rare and beautiful flowers.
