'BBBS' is the artists feline alter-ego. A mercurial cat, real-world and metaphorical, positive and negative for Leonie, this dichotomous misfit 'other' emerged in adolescence as a protective mechanism and developed into a successful DJ-persona. 

 

The sculpture is a ‘phygital-meta-portrait’ of this subversive sonic-identity. Leonie hand-modelled the figure in clay before casting it into bronze and uploading a scan of that bronze into the Metaverse as a 3-dimensional digital object. This online avatar exists in multiple places and sizes at once, transforming with its environment, adopting surrounding scale and imagery to grow new coats. This online avatar can be accessed via the QR code exhibited next to the sculpture. The object file was printed and re-cast into solid Sterling silver at 10% of its original size and finished with traditional tools by hand. 

 

 Looking back to a lineage of traditional material practices, the sculpture leans towards the emergent Metaverse, historically prefiguring a virtual identity just ahead of the digital-economy assigning one. It celebrates the autonomy, equity and transfiguration possible in a progressive socio-virtual reality, as envisioned by internet pioneers, while facing the precarity of our multifaceted psyches within arenas infiltrated by corporations, meta-algorithms and dangerous disinformation.