Interview with the artist Stefan Mathez, most widely known with his pseudonym Toomuchlag. He is the creator of the cover of this last issue of The NFT Magazine, entitled “Le Anime”, of the NFT collection “My Journey”.
The work was originally sold for $32,000 on the Nifty Gateway in May 2021. Toomuchlag has dropped on the best NFT platforms such as SuperRare, Nifty, Rarible, Async and MakersPlace, totaling millions of dollars in sales. With this interview we wanted to better understand how he got into the industry and how his career is evolving in the NFT world and not only.
How and when did you start taking your first steps in the NFT world? Why?
In 2020 I started to mint my first NFTs. The great sales we see nowadays didn’t exist yet and the value of ETH was perhaps a tenth of that of today. I was fascinated by the potential of NFTs as a revolution in the art world and immediately found myself in tune with the community. I have met artists and collectors with whom to share passions, and that have become special friends.
When I started I didn’t know what was going to happen, but I decided to go for it 100% as I was absolutely convinced of the potential of this technology. After the first sales I decided to reinvest everything I had to create ‘Satoshi’s Coin’, a work that includes in the smart contract 1 entire Bitcoin, giving the collector the opportunity to burn the work and move to the next state to redeem 1 Bitcoin.
With Satoshi’s Coin, the idea was to create something new that would reflect on the importance and on the value of art (compared to the value of money), exploiting the possibilities that blockchain can offer in terms of art and coding. The answer to the question: ‘Which is more important, the value of art or the value of money ?’ is left to the collector.
I am very happy that the collector of the opera, Illestrater, has decided to keep the work intact, asserting ‘Satoshi’s Coin’ a piece of history.
What did you do before? Can you tell us about your pre-NFT career?
For several years I worked as a motion graphic designer in London, creating videos for brands. Shortly before the beginning of the pandemic I decided to move on to the next stage of my life and I opened my company in London to work exclusively on visual projects with 3D animations. Just before discovering the NFT world I was finishing up creating the videos of the album ‘Máquina do Tiempo’ for Matuê, a Brazilian artist who contacted me after seeing my works posted on IG.
I am very happy to have joined this project as the videos of the album have had great success and to date they have totaled more than 300 million views on YouTube.
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