Vignesh Sundaresan, also known as Metakovan, is a self-described ‘blockchain technologist’, collector and founder of the cryptocurrency fund Metapurse. In 2025 Sundaresan opened Padimai Art & Tech Studio in Singapore, operating exhibitions as well as hosting a blockchain residency.
ArtReview Your background is in technology; how did your support of art begin?
Vignesh Sundaresan When I got into art, I never thought about a common good or the philanthropic angle. But I remember the moment when it hit me, which was in Copenhagen, on a pedestrian bridge that Olafur Eliasson had built. There’s definitely a functional component to the bridge, but there’s more to it than that. It was so interesting, thinking about digital and things that are not very physical, but I think I’m not building anything different from that bridge. I want to build and allow things to exist that people can walk on. I always compare what I’m building to a digital garden, or a public park. There are some spaces on the internet, like Wikipedia or nonprofits governed by a physical entity, attempting to make a public platform; but are there native digital public platforms, like a forest or like a park? That’s what my exploration has been.
AR Do you think there’s still a kind of snobbism about digital art, an attitude that it’s not really art? If you compare it to reactions to early hip-hop, where it was seen as not really music.
VS There are definitely good criticisms of digital, but when something is changing, someone on the outside always bases their opinion on the few points or interfaces they get to experience. From the inside, you see all these small things that are growing, that have potential and are exciting. Those things are what we set our hope on, not the mainstream view.
AR Islands in the Net, the second show at Padimai, on at the moment, is a mixture of art, research and technology, different from a conventional art show, and bridging some of the behind-the-scenes aspects that contribute to artmaking as well as some of the more obviously showy elements. Is that one of the functions or motivations for what you’re doing with your philanthropy?
VS When you’re in the tech world, you think about scalability. The question ‘Is it working?’ is decided by if someone is using it. Are the number of users growing? It’s a very one-dimensional metric that decides what gets built and what gets built more. What excites me about art and these kinds of experiments is that you have that moment when that’s not the metric. If it connects to a couple of people these four months, then it’s done its job. It’s all about documenting also. For example, with the Bussy Temple collective, they have a small altar in the space that is displaying their archive. I was so excited by that work: it’s a simple website that just shows a timeline of various parties they’ve done, and then some pictures from it. It’s nice to preserve that history, because you don’t know how things might change in a year. Now it’s permanently preserved. It’ll be hard to erase the fact that the Bussy Temple existed and happened in Singapore. It’s in the archive, and I am 99.9 percent sure that it’ll persist.
AR In line with that, you’re supporting a lot of conservation of digital artworks. Do you think that’s partly because most people don’t think that the digital world requires any conservation or preservation?
VS Yes. What I’ve found working with artists is that they sometimes think, ‘This should just work out.’ Digital infrastructure is very fragile. It’s very new, and it’s not very familiar to people. It’s in the backend. But I enjoy working in that area because it’s like plumbing. That’s the most important work, because you get it done and then the city can grow. Singapore is so good at that plumbing. As a country, they are very aware of what is the base, what’s the foundation and what are the layers that can go on top of that. In the same way, when I’m thinking about conservation, I’m thinking about the future, and asking, ‘OK, so tomorrow if we commission artwork, what should be the foundation layer, the infrastructure layer so that it will not require conservation?’ That does not exist today. If you take, for example, Margaret Tan’s Virtual Bodies in Reality, from 2001, they imagined a 3D work where a body is turning 360 degrees. None of it was possible then; they managed 20 degrees. When I look at it though, it’s like a clock: I see elegance; I see how the constraints of technology in that period led to a series of decisions which made that artwork so beautiful for that moment, and it is amazing for us to look back at it. I got goosebumps when the artwork got recovered. The conservation process involved working closely with Tan to recover and reconstruct elements of the original work that had been lost or become inoperable, including missing visual responses, while preserving the technological constraints and behaviours that were integral to how the work was originally experienced.
AR In the current show, you’ve got Grace Quek, which archives a part of Singapore’s art history. There’s the general assumption that if you’re working in a digital space, you’re only ever working with the brand new.
VS Grace’s work is interesting because she is going back to a performance she first made in 1998 and revisiting it through the technologies we have today. So it is a new work, but it also brings something from that earlier moment back into the present. There are past things which were not recorded on the blockchain at that time, and I am interested in going back and doing them as projects. Today, when you work on something, I think about it as a live archiving project. When the project is happening, we introduce various sensors so that the archive can also be automated, and it can be live so that when things are happening with the artwork or the experience, there are things that go into the archive automatically. That’s for today and for tomorrow.
When I look at the past works, like Margaret Tan’s Virtual Bodies in Reality, they all have a sense of archaeology. It’s similar to physical art and conservation where you dig in, and you find out so much about that time and about the attitudes, about the decisions. That knowledge is very important for the future. These projects can then become a source of your working knowledge, your working model.
AR We’ve talked about stuff that can be archived and preserved, but are you interested in things that can’t be? That just disappear?
VS Code is very precise, but say, for example, with Virtual Bodies in Reality, they designed it to use your mouse to hit or heal a body, and the hits would create a bruise. Those bruises were large image files, which they didn’t save because they didn’t have space in their floppy disks. So we had to create a patch for the missing bruises. Digital art is also technology history. Where we will need archaeology and anthropology, in the future, is for information overload. More than missing information, being about to find out what’s not spam and to find out what’s real – that will be our problem.
AR Doing the plumbing and infrastructure work you’re doing, which seems vital to the artwork’s ongoing existence, raises inevitable questions about who owns that plumbing. If you take the actual plumbing in, say, Singapore, the state owns it, or with iTunes, for example, Apple owns it.
VS It’s a very important question, because I divide the plumbing into two. One is the open design, and one is the actual storage or the application of the design. When it comes to the application of the design, the foundation is there to house the data or documentation that needs to be stored on behalf of, say, the artist. It’s the institution’s responsibility, and the institution may not have the ownership or the rights to, in copyright terms, exploit it. Although there are situations where it can be owned by the foundation, or the foundation can be a custodian. It’s long-term storage, so the artist knows that they can come back to the foundation and be like, “Can I get my files?” And the answer is, of course, “Yes”.
When it comes to digital conservation and my working pattern, whichI would apply to Virtual Bodies in Reality or any new work, I take that design, make it a generic design, and I keep that open source. For me, success would be someone else taking that design and running their own project. Then I imagine a way for it to be easily ported from one institution to another. You need to think like that – about how the life of these things can be extended. Because this has been a problem. You go into the storerooms of the National Gallery Singapore, for example, and you see all these CDs and floppy disks, books and so much more piling up, and it’s obviously not feasible to keep accumulating data in this way in the long term.
AR It’s a matter of hardware as well, right?
VS There was a time when CDs were the way to archive, or hard disk was the way to archive. Today, it’s changing; I use blockchain as a tool to separate the index of what’s being stored and where it’s actually being stored, so that the blockchain becomes this lightweight system. That’s what I imagine might be applied or installed by many people, not just the financial idea of one blockchain to rule them all, but to be a software like WordPress, where someone can think “Oh, yes, I can deploy it myself.” I want the ownership, the economy, all of these things, to be emerging like a wild forest.
AR Are you separating the question of ownership from the artwork itself?
VS I think there are three things: there’s ownership, which is completely a legal concept, there is custodianship, and then there is storage. The custodianship could be thought about as a responsibility or a service agreement. The storage itself is a mechanism. When I design these systems, I particularly don’t use the words like ownership because I think it’s different for different jurisdictions, but custodianship is a much lighter word. That’s why I use words like actant and custodianship as part of the software and allow the other layers to just figure them out.
AR That language, like custodianship, is also the polite way people would talk about their physical art collections: “I’m just the custodian.” But they do own it; is what you’re doing also about changing the way we understand this language?
VS When you take, say, an NFT, I know there’s an ownership component to it, but the data actually is also publicly available. It’s a constant question of, what do you own? Do you own anything? Is it a financialisable object even? I like all those questions, but the data itself actually is something that’s intended to be experienced publicly. I think that the NFT moment already changed a lot of things, but we’ve not completely grasped it.
AR How much have the artists you’ve worked with shaped how you think about your activities as a philanthropist and with the foundation?
VS I would say 100 percent, because I had an open mind. I didn’t completely understand, and probably even now don’t fully understand what I’m getting into, and I enjoy that. The way the works come up, and the conversations take you, shapes my decisions and my platforms. I think over a couple of years I’ve found those generic grades of how this can be done, but I don’t think I have a method or pattern.
With the commissioned works or conservation, there is a period or a preface to it being structured, you’re working on these very fluid ideas. The first experiment is so random that you don’t even know what contracts to make, or what risks you take. If you look at the contracts that we sign with the artists, even if the artwork will not emerge out of this, that’s perfectly all right.
Alongside the commissioned works, I wanted to think about, “Why don’t we do a collaborative or a collective experience?” I don’t have a space to host people where they can come and stay there, but I imagine the blockchain for myself already as my home. We created an on-chain residency, where the chain is the foundation and gives it a timeline. Say one artist is going to archive something there – some inspiration or a reference – it’s going to be here, and it can then exist alongside another contribution by another person, and another. And now we are going to coexist and commingle our histories. It’s like a thread: it only tightens the bonds.
AR It also requires the artist to give up some degree of ownership.
VS I think it’s not about giving up ownership necessarily just because you add something to the archive. You can also say, “I added to the archive. You cannot use it.” You can store it, and the data can be encrypted, and you can keep the password. There’ll be some things that you don’t put on the chain and some things you are OK to put on the chain, and some things you’re OK to make public. We can work with these new areas of technology. That’s what I think is interesting.
AR Do you have a policy on AI involvement in projects?
VS If it’s a digital artwork, I’m completely open to working with AI as a technical assistant. I don’t necessarily want AI-generated ideas, but I use AI as a cloud infrastructure orchestrator. It’s a very good assistant. In my experience, even with Olafur Eliasson or Grace Quek, there is this gap between the artist and the work. Who fills it? It’s a technical problem, but it doesn’t mean only technicians can be artists. It’s a long existing question. There is a spectrum of how you want to engage with the medium. With AI as an assistant, I think you can expand that spectrum a little.
When it comes to art, even when it comes to coding, it still relies on context. Who has the context? You? Forever? It’ll be hard for you to take yourself and then give your context to an AI, because it has a limited context window. That’s a technology problem, but it’s also about communication. A simple way to put it is that AI is LLM, which is a large language model, and there is so much that’s not language. AI is a great imitator. Even an idea, it’s imitating. I think humans have evolved in a very interesting way, and there is a frontier area, I think, that will always be with the artist, with the human.
AR The kind of work you’re doing isn’t limited by geographic borders. While Singapore is a kind of base, are you working in other areas?
VS With what the blockchain allows, the archive is decentralised. I can have one copy in Berlin, one copy in India and one copy in Singapore. Even into the future, I’m thinking about how do I exist in many places. I’m very aware of what my physical footprints are so that I’m never restricted by it. With Padimai, it’s a temporary space. It’s a choice, but it’s also a comfort. In the future, I don’t know where Padimai would be. Will it be in the same place? Will it be in a different country? I don’t know. It is also going to travel.
ArtReview’s October issue is accompanied by Philanthropy Today, a standalone 66-page publication on the evolving nature of philanthropy in the arts, including feature articles on key concerns within the field, case studies on how philanthropy is involved in shaping the public sphere, and interviews with prominent philanthropists. This publication was created with the support of Padimai Art & Tech Studio