You’ve likely seen an iHeart creation around Vancouver. Crane your neck at the side of a Vancouver General Hospital building and you could have seen his “Catch of the Day”: a boy fishing for likes. False Creek, Stanley Park, and Kits beach have all played host to his unique stencils, as have nooks and alleyways across the city. Each are biting, Banksy-esque critiques of online culture.

Enter Web3. Much of the anonymous creator’s previous work has focused on social media – the TripAdvisor review of his own work, the woman with two new shady followers, the child using autocorrect. But as the digital world shifts to blockchain and the metaverse, iHeart’s designs have evolved with it.

Today, his first NFT project, titled “Hollowgram,” will be released on Nifty Gateway. He describes the image to Vancouver Tech Journal as “depicting a young boy's ennui as his holoprojector displays images wrought with nostalgia, waste and loss.” More than just a picture, however, the creation aims to interrogate the issues at the heart of blockchain and art: whether artworks can truly be owned, and how the online and physical worlds can converge.

iHeart is a purist. “If it’s not on the street,” he says, “then it can’t be street art.” True to his roots, the artist has designed his “Hollowgram” project to fuse the digital and the real. The sale on Nifty Gateway has two parts: not only will the buyer own the NFT, but iHeart has promised to personally recreate the image on a physical wall in their city.

“I think everyone has this burning question of ‘How can street art fit into this digital space?’” he says. “It's easy to force street art into other contexts, like cutting the work out of walls and displaying it in galleries. But the energy it has in its original context is what gives it value. The only way to preserve that in the NFT space is to blur the boundaries between these physical and digital spaces…I think that this is a way that we can bring the digital world back into the physical world, and make it part of something bigger.”

By questioning the distinction between digitization and reality, the masked creator is exploring the issues around ownership of art and the role of blockchain. As NFT prices have soared, artworks have become the playthings of the rich: a mark of exclusivity in which the buyer is both art-savvy and tech-forward. Street art, by contrast, is a public media that is accessible to everybody.

“NFTs inherently are about ownership, and are, sort of, this certificate of authenticity for something that just belongs to a person,” he says. “But street art doesn’t belong to just one person. It belongs to everyone.”

Purchasing his NFT, iHeart suggests, is not just about owning a piece of his art, but giving back to the buyer’s community. The NFT-holder becomes a commissioner, bringing a new piece of street art to their city and democratizing how it can be viewed. 

“Artists have a proclivity to define the spaces in which they inhabit and I wanted to push for a space that fosters more than exclusivity and speculation,” iHeart says. “I wanted to create a space where NFT owners can bring street artists to their cities. By these means, ownership can serve as a charitable donation to the owner's community and its culture.”

Even though the recent crash in crypto has dropped the value of many high-profile NFTs, iHeart doesn’t think this creation will be his last. This integration of the digital into his work is the first of many; as cutting-edge tech becomes more accessible, he hopes to incorporate elements like augmented reality into his street stencils. Using online culture as both his subject and medium, the masked creator remains one of Vancouver’s most relevant artists.

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