Infinity Reborn: Our Journey to 2023 and Beyond
--
Hey explorer!
Happy 2023. So much has happened. From endless partnerships, collabs & integrations, to our 1k+ page/5k+ edit community wiki, to sending our final merging pieces to the International Space Station, Times Square and more, to many new upgrades and metadata, 3D assets, IRL meetups/talks from Lisbon to Art Basel and beyond, to our 1 year anniversary.
Now that 8-timeline merging is live (as of Dec 31, 2022 — Blog post here), we wanted to release a blog post talking a bit about how we think about the future of Infinity Labs.
If you like this blog post, let us know in Discord!
This blog post covers a variety of topics, including:
- A Natural Evolution: Infinite Creations from the Original Scenes from the Solverse — A Larger Connected Story.
- How we think about the future of Infinity Labs — Creative Studio Inspirations: Drawing from works of MIT Media Lab meets Web3 Marvel
- Our current priorities and thoughts — Putting in our reps to become world class.
- Missteps we are hoping to avoid.
- Some current internal experiments & Behind the Scenes (BTS).
In planning for our future we are always keeping in mind that our goal is to encourage and foster the creativity of Infinity Labs and by extension, all of our community.
Infinite Creations from the Original Scenes from the Solverse — A Larger Connected Story
Starting from the original Infinity Labs: Scenes from the Solverse collection, we desire to continuously build on top of it, and eventually empower others to do the same.
We believe that by creating a universe with a cohesive, connected story, we can create experiences that are more powerful than the sum of their parts. We’re excited to create something special, and invite you to join us on this journey to infinity.
Creative Studio Inspirations: Drawing from works of MIT Media Lab meets Web3 Marvel
Our ambition is to become a generational entertainment company with powerful stories and IP utilizing cutting edge technologies that complement each other. Inspired by both the works of MIT Media Lab and Web3 Marvel, we want to create experiments, experiences and stories that can stand the test of time, and attract world-class talent to create and experiment with us.
MIT Media Lab is an interdisciplinary research lab that encourages the unconventional mixing and matching of seemingly disparate research areas, drawing from technology, media, science, art, and design; whereas Marvel is a decades-old entertainment company committed to bringing great stories, characters, and experiences to fans all over the world.
As both technologists and multidisciplinary artists, Infinity Labs is inspired by the intersection of both.
Yes, we understand that it often takes decades for such entities to emerge (think MIT, Marvel, Disney) and for beloved IP to develop. But every journey begins with a single step, and we believe that we’ve created something special.
We believe that by focusing on developing our team’s skills (increasing internal creative output and capabilities), relationship building, and community building with people who truly love Infinity Labs for what it is, we can continue to create things that can outlive us. We want to be a project based on creativity, innovation, and community.
If you haven’t already, check out this video of our founder Infinity Eve talking about the origins of Infinity Labs and building to outlive us.
Who we are:
“A project aiming at creating generational stories and IP that can outlive us, develop cutting edge experiments, and culture a community of collectors — members who are here because they choose to be and ultimately believe in the long-term ambitions of the project.”
Who we’re not:
“A project based on hype cycles or pump/dump mechanics.”
We aim to make things we’re proud of, without sacrificing the time, iteration and reps needed to develop our expertise and experiments. We also strive to ignite people to create in the Infinity Labs Universe starting with Scenes from the Solverse, and we’re excited to see how our community will bring that creative spark to life.
The need to focus on what matters — 1000 true fans
In bear markets, we believe that we need to focus on what we can control. That means investing in our team’s skills, relationship building, and community building with people who truly love Infinity Labs for what it is — a passionate community that cannot be built on people who kind of like us.
“It’s better to have 100 people that love you than a million people that just sort of like you. Find 100 people that love you.” — Paul Graham
We agree. Paul endorses the idea that people who really love a product make it go viral, not people who kind of like you. This is also similar to Seth Godin’s idea that you can do anything with 1,000 true fans. If we try to appeal to too many avatars, we won’t serve any one particularly well and we’ll never be able to build a compounding fan base that we desire. This is especially true in web3, where there can be a million distractions and/or oscillating sentiment based on factors outside of our control.
It also means we have to consciously make the decision to focus on what matters, and choose to tune out the noise.
Putting in our reps — the quest to become world-class creative talents in web3
It’s simple: world class talent wants to work with other world class talent. So to build a world-class team and attract contributors who want to create with us in our community, we must become world-class ourselves. In addition, to inspire others to build great things on top of / in our universe, we must also first do that ourselves.
To create things that people love you must make something you yourself would love and be proud of.
To get attention you must make something worth paying attention to.
Sometimes this isn’t recognized immediately or at all (Van Gogh passed away before his works were recognized), but we always aim to make things we’re proud of, without sacrificing iteration and reps needed to develop expertise. We believe that that’s relevant no matter what market we’re in.
In creative endeavors such as ours where this is especially relevant, the only way to get world class is to put in the reps and create a lot, even if a lot of it won’t work out or be good. Often, current NFT communities can actually discourage this behavior by having short-term focuses that’s suboptimal for art projects. If we let short-term thinking distract us, we won’t be able to progress to our goals.
We have regular creative sessions internally to show off our latest experiments and brainstormed stories within the Solverse.
Some Current, Past and Ongoing Internal Experiments + Behind the Scenes
We also wanted to show some behind the scenes content. From AR to applications in sound, AI, storytelling, interactivity and presence at in-person events, the team internally has been brainstorming the overall Infinity Labs canon story and conducting experiments.
Here’s a collage of images and videos (you’ve seen a bunch more behind the scenes content above about this blog post):
We hope you enjoyed this post. If you like this behind the scenes type of content, please let us know. Don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter here:
Onwards and upwards (literally),
The Infinity Labs Team
