On Monday, Jan. 29, holders of Mars Rocks from Tom Sachs: Rocket Factory will be able to mint a space station apartment—or even an entire world—as part of the Final Frontier, a hand-built galaxy metaverse created by renowned sculptor Tom Sachs in partnership with Monaverse.
The 1,000 planets and 5,666 handmade apartments, located in the art-focused Monaverse metaverse, will be available to holders of Mars Rocks—and to those who hold Tom Sachs Rocket Factory IDs issued at NFT NYC in 2023—in a presale opening on Monday, Jan. 29.
“The Metaverse is real; it’s just another dimension of reality. In this new dimension, we make the galaxy, not the way it is but the way we want it to be. We form our universe and our community to our desires, ambitions, and, ultimately, our pursuit and acceptance of the sublime. Behold… The Final Frontier,” creator Tom Sachs told nft now.
Final Frontier is not a random drop from an unknown: Tom Sachs, who has maintained a strong practice in physical sculpture for decades, has repeatedly delved into digital art in his creations.
The realms he is now unveiling got their start during the NFT bull run in 2021, with a collection of NFT rocket ships that offered holders the chance to have a physical version of their rocket actually launched into the heavens.
Inspired by Le Corbusier’s “Unite d’Habitation” blueprints, the Final Frontier’s digital spaces, powered by Mona’s newly launched Creator Studio, range from whole planets down to apartments within enormous space stations. They are available to Rock and ID holders for .05 ETH, and any leftovers will be made available for public sale on Feb. 8 for .08.
nft now sat down with members of Tom Sachs’ Rocket Factory for an exclusive interview to learn more about the project—which has an innovative, long-range scope that resonates with its space-exploration theme.
“This is the third phase of the Rocket Factory—what we call the Final Frontier,” TSRF team member Charlie Koss told nft now in an interview.
Like all good space missions, this project has been years in the making. “Beginning in phase one, which launched in the summer of 2021, The Rocket Factory introduced a cutting-edge, first-of-its-kind project, where we linked the digital and physical worlds together seamlessly by releasing 1000 rockets into the web3 universe. We invited the audience to assemble, from three components, unique rockets that reflected themselves,” he said.
“The Metaverse is real; it’s just another dimension of reality. In this new dimension, we make the galaxy, not the way it is but the way we want it to be.”
tom sachs
The project pioneered the combination of physical and digital works in an art practice that captivated a community of fans. “If you assembled one of these rockets, you had the option to launch them in physical space. We held launch events around the world. And we would physically make an exact replica of your digital rocket, launch it into space, recover it, and send it to the holder of the NFT. It was an amazing undertaking. It was truly its own space program, the amount of lift that it required—involving every aspect of Tom’s studio. We had people working around the clock to assemble, build these rockets, get them out,” said Koss.
The project’s next stage was Mars Rocks—over a week, would-be explorers mined the rocks within a Martian realm built in Decentraland. This project got Sachs and the team thinking about how they could take the metaverse concept further.
Thus, the Final Frontier. “We developed a generative galaxy—the first galaxy that’s hosted on decentralized computers. And we did that on Mona’s platform. It’s a fully generative project, and it’s a hand-generated NFT collection. Overarching the theme for our project is Tom Sachs, a world-renowned artist in sculpture. We make the world not the way it is but the way we want it to be,” Koss explained.
Creating the project was a monumental challenge for the Rocket Factory team. None of them are computer programmers: to get the project’s metadata ready for Monaverse to display it, they had to code it into Google Sheets, explained Koss.
The Final Frontier metadata, including parameters and rarities that arise from the nature of the Mars Rocks that preceded the galactic spaces, has a level of detail and variety that gives it realism, according to Koss. “We were able to transform this unbelievable amount of data into a real living, breathing universe, and that’s what’s being released on Monday to the community,” he said.
One special aspect of Final Frontier is that it is fully decentralized; each space within the Monaverse will be completely under its owner’s control. Erum Shah, a longtime member of Sachs’ studio, told nft now that this is a core tenet of his lifelong artistic vision.
“This has been such a natural extension of his practice. Tom’s engaged In world-building now for decades: his Space Program, which he established in 2007 at the Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills but then brought to the Park Avenue Armory in 2012, with a mission to Mars. From there, we’ve been to Europa, the icy moon of Jupiter, and, most recently, the asteroid Vesta to harvest rare earth minerals. So, knowing that world-building, whether it’s in the form of Tom’s Space Program or Nutsy’s World, which I think was an early foray for Tom—taking something digital, like a video game, and figuring out how to make it in his plywood form—is something that he’s always engaged in,” she told us.
“Every decision from which rockets were assembled, how many were assembled, to where on Mars people chose to mint and mine Mars Rocks, shaped this generative galaxy that we put together.”
ERUM SHAH
“You see that every decision from which rockets were assembled, how many were assembled, to where on Mars people chose to mint and mine Mars Rocks, shaped this generative galaxy that we put together. With NFT Studios—they’ve been in the space for 10-plus years. So there was this real authenticity of what we can bring, what we understand,” said Shah.
Since 2021, the Rocket Factory has teamed with NFT Studios to deliver the project—and now Monaverse is on board, helping bring Sachs’ vision to life. “As Charlie said, we code the way we build something out of plywood. The combination of that with the elegant code that our partnership with NFT Studios could bring allowed us to create this really rich project—then, in 2023, to meet Justin and the team and see what they were doing at Mona—now all of this that we’ve built, in code and with our team, now has a place to be powered,” said Shah.
What can you do in the Final Frontier galaxy? One big activity will be crafting and fitting out your abode to make it just how you want it; a Stuff mint, offering Sachs-designed elements for your galactic palace, will open ten days after the Final Frontier mint.
Final Frontier is about reimagining what the Internet is for, Monaverse founder and CEO Justin Melillo told us. “We firmly believe that the future of the Internet is immersive. We’re so over the death scrolls of existing social media networks—what’s really, really exciting is we are living through an entire paradigm shift for how we as humans interact with content online, how we interact with computers, and how we connect with each other across borders. And so this is really how we view the metaverse to be—it’s really just the future of the Internet being more immersive,” he said.
According to Melillo, there will also be opportunities in Final Frontier to socialize, explore, and even play games together.
“We have some really exciting creator tools that we’re just so thrilled that the Tom Sachs Rocket Factory has been taking full advantage of—that will allow people to not only access these worlds and join them all together with hundreds of people all in the same planets, jumping through portals across different planets and Space Station apartments. You have full social capabilities like voice chat, text chat, you have customizable avatars, you can do so many things together, you can play games together. And then, with all of the incredible collection of Tom Sachs Stuff, you can now start to also customize your planets and your spaces and invite people to them. And very, very soon, as I said, you’ll be able to also craft and create new types of things and experiences and things to do together,” And this is all accessible over the web—super accessible and built on the tenants of web3, which really is all about self-sovereign ownership of our assets in this new digital realm,” he said.
“Digital communities are exactly the same as other communities, they are made up of people. Computers don’t replace human experience, they are a means by which we create a nuanced representation of our values.”
TOM SACHS
In his decades-long commitment to his artistic vision, Sachs himself believes that what’s most important about Final Frontier is the human element.
“Digital communities are exactly the same as other communities, they are made up of people. Computers don’t replace human experience, they are a means by which we create a nuanced representation of our values. Everything is exactly as it should be. We create our perfect world, including scars, wrinkles, and all the imperfections that make up the human experience,” he said.
