Angelo Sotira started the online art platform Breach When he was just a teenager, cultivating a formative community for millions of artists in the 2000s. Twenty -five years later, Sotira wants to change digital art again, but with emphasis on the way it appears.
On Thursday, Sotira revealed his new business, LayerA screen specially designed to present digital art with the best quality possible.
“The way the canvas has to perform and behave in your life is quite different from other types of screens,” Sotira told TechCrunch. “It must be combined in beautiful environments.”
The closest reference to the average consumer for a product like this is Samsung’s The Frame TV, which looks like a painting that hung on the wall when not enabled. But the mattress gets this kind of feeling at an even more premium level – unlike the frame, the mattress is not a consumer product and does not try to imitate static tables or photos.
“It’s $ 22,000, so this kind tells you a lot about who it is for,” Sotira said. “We didn’t save any costs and we didn’t save any efforts. We didn’t make any compromise on production what, in our opinion, the best way to project digital art on a wall.”
When Sotira talks about digital art, he doesn’t talk about digital photography or videos.
Layer works with hundreds of artists such as ReferenceWhich makes genetic art – not, not the type of AI genetic art as you will have from Chatgpt, created with LLMS using the work of other artists without their consent. Instead, many of these artists write their own software to create digital works of art that change over time according to what the code says.
But these works of art can require a lot of information technology for execution. This is part of the because the mattress is so expensive – it takes the technological ability to display these new projects.
“You are considering a more than 35 years of history of excellent artists who develop the code -based art and essentially, the pixels on the screen are governed by the coding that is running live in this GPU, making it complete,” Sotira said. “It really controls every pixel, so it doesn’t go through compression algorithms.”
Sotira is well aware that he is not the first entrepreneur to try to create a better way to project digital art – when he was in Deviantart, he had been put on products like layer all the time. But because of this, he knows what was missing from the products that rushed to him in the past.
“One of the principles of driving is that you can connect, activate it and leave it on its own and you should know how to follow art for you,” he said.
From his experience, he enjoys flying with these devices for a few weeks, but then he is tiring to continue to update the screen, so he wanted his own canvas to be more self -sufficient.
“It will be on your wall for five years, so it must really play, very well in your life.”
The mattress looks like an extremely expensive and very specialized product, but some business capitalists and entrepreneurs bet. While in Stealth, the start raised $ 5.7 million in funding from Expa Ventures, Human Businesses and Slauson & Co., as well as angels, such as Twitter co -founder, Evan Williams and co -founder of Behance Scott Belsky.
The company’s ambitions extend beyond the sale of material for the appearance of art. With a mattress canvas, the owners receive access to a collection of art from the digital artists collaborating. Then, these artists are paid rights based on the time their works are located.
“We first put the artists and this is the kind of basic mission and philosophy of the mattress,” Sotira said.
