Jim Carrey’s first NFT – The Cryptonomist

Yesterday, celebrated American actor Jim Carrey officially announced that he owns his first NFT. 

This one stops me. James Joyce said that’s a good thing. Thank you @ryankoopmans for gently capturing nature’s exquisite and relentless reinvention. BTW you’re my first NFT. @SuperRare https://t.co/jyFoD7nKSC pic.twitter.com/hXEoQ639Py

— Jim Carrey (@JimCarrey) June 1, 2022

Jim Carrey acquires an NFT for the first time

It is a digital work put up for sale on SuperRare entitled “Devotion“. 

The work belongs to the collection “The Wild Within” by Ryan Koopmans and Alice Wexell. It is a series of digital works that aim to bring new life into abandoned Soviet-era buildings. 

These works are based on real spaces in the physical world, and in which a kind of animated rebirth is recreated in the digital world.

Specifically, Devotion is based on a building in the Georgian town of Tskaltubo, a popular Soviet tourist destination famous for its therapeutic waters. 

Between 1940 and 1980, thousands of people visited the Tskaltubo spa, including Stalin himself. However, when the Soviet Union collapsed, the city’s spa buildings were abandoned and fell into disrepair. 

Their dismantling actually began in the 1990s, so that they were completely stripped out leaving only empty shells of what were once grandiose classical structures. 

Koopmans travelled to these places for years, exploring many of these ruins and photographing their empty spaces. On his return, in collaboration with Alice Wexell, he created digital works by digitally introducing vegetation, manipulating lighting and structure, adding sounds by Erik Thome, and animating the scenes. The artists’ intention is to bring these spaces back to life by digitally, and artificially, bringing those rooms to life. 

The end result is a surreal marriage of the past and the future, of the physical and digital worlds. 

The story of the NFT ‘Devotion’ and the famous actor’s impressions 

After being created by Ryan Koopmans about six months ago, the Devotion NFT was then purchased a few days ago by user moonpay for 20 ETH (almost $40,000). Moonpay then sent the token to Jim Carrey a couple of days ago, so the American actor is currently the owner of this NFT. 

According to Carrey, this work delicately captures the exquisite and relentless reinvention of nature. 

In fact, the artists superimposed on the bare and decrepit walls of the spa building the image of a lush and shining nature, which gives a completely new idea of the gloomy and sad scenery. A sort of “reinvention of nature”, albeit artificial and purely digital. 

Carrey has more than 19 million followers on Twitter, and his tweet announcing his first NFT received more than 10,000 likes and 1,300 retweets. 

The Canadian-born actor is by far one of the most famous actors in the world, made famous by hugely successful films such as Ace Ventura, The Mask, Dumb & Dumber, The Grinch, The Truman Show and Bruce Almighty, and for his role as the Riddler in Batman Forever. 

He is not the first global celebrity to throw himself into the world of NFTs, and he certainly won’t be the last.