Diego González, Ph.D.
Founder & Managing Director
Hussein Hashish M.Sc.
Talent & Brand Management
Michael Hudson
Product Design
Javier Felix
VP of Strategic Partnerships
Founded in 2016 by Diego González during his postdoctoral tenure at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, under the guidance of Fatih Oguz, SciArt Lab emerged as a groundbreaking initiative at the intersection of art and technology.
As a spin-off and a commons-based peer production startup, SciArt Lab initially concentrated on multi-disciplinary R&D projects. With a focus on the application of digital technologies in the context of interdisciplinary
studies, including ethnographic research, qualitative methods, software engineering, and data visualization.
It also launched educational programs and workshops at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro, which delved into microcontrollers, electronic interfaces, musical instruments, code-generated digital art, genetic algorithms for music generation and, ultimatelly, virtual reality experiences. But it was the development of Virtual Reality projects what would have a radical impact in the evolution of SciArt Lab in the following years.
Building upon the experiences gained from Bitmind, an earlier venture by Diego Gonzalez and Vasilis Kostakis (one of the SciArt Lab Advisors) later integrated into the P2P Foundation, SciArt Lab evolved.
It began focusing on the synergy of new peer-to-peer (P2P) protocols like IPFS, the Ethereum blockchain, and virtual reality technologies to forge a distributed metaverse conducive to artistic and scientific exploration. This was years before Facebook changed its name to "Meta", when the concept "metaverse" was still not mainstream.
The SciArt Lab Metaverse Components project quickly garnered attention on social media, notably being featured in the Week of A-Frame series, supported by Mozilla. This visibility led to a significant partnership with Decentraland, a leading name in the blockchain-based startup ecosystem and the platform for SciArt Lab's actual metaverse development.
SciArt Lab's contributions to Decentraland included creating an entire virutal district featuring the first metaverse campus, NFT art galleries, museums, a cinema, and academic facilities, alongside collaborations with renowned brands.
With a growing community of developers, researchers, and artists, SciArt Lab initiated some of the earliest social and educational campaigns around NFTs and mental health. We also established research partnerships with prestigious institutions like Harvard University, CNRS, EUI, Taltech, and NTNU.
Even though SciArt Lab stopped officially developing new projects in 2023, it spawned and nurtured several spin-offs and independent initiatives. Additionally, SENSE-GARDEN continues developing the SciArt Lab projects that were related to Education, Mental Health and Well-being. Meanwhile, several individuals and organizations are still operating in the SciArt Lab Metaverse District in Decentraland, immortalized on the blockchain forever.