Collection Spotlight: Satoverse
TLDR: Born from idle mind of an office drone, the Satoverse became an escape from the boredom of the office. The mind wanders to wild places when trying to pass time, and this collection is a journey through these many destinations through a spin on the classic character of Pepe the Frog.
Collection Site: https://joepegs.com/collections/satoverse
Twitter: https://twitter.com/nft_sato
The world is boring — and it’s our own fault.
We kinda set ourselves up to be bored all the time. It’s the price we pay for collectively becoming “too good” at getting things done. Technology has turned us into productivity machines. Jobs that would’ve taken multiple days to do just a few decades ago — now we can get them done in 20 minutes on Excel. We’ve been on an absolutely parabolic run for finding ways to do things quicker.
Manufacturing stuff? We got robots.
Organizing stuff? We got software.
Selling stuff? We got the internet.
So where does that leave a lot of us? Well, we all still have to work don’t we. So we all ended up getting jobs — in offices.
There is perhaps no greater proof that humans have gotten way too productive than the advent of office work. Every Monday morning you arrive to punch in and begin thinking about how you’re gonna turn your 10-20 hours worth of work into a full 40 hours of time at your desk. Basically finding ways to throttle down your productivity, so you can make it through the week without going insane. That’s the unfortunate reality of the working world for a huge chunk of people today.
If you’re one of the people who loves their office job, you’ve done well for yourself. Many of us envy you. However, for each of you there is likely 10+ office drones that are stuck doing monotonous work all week. These drones always get stuck with one extra assignment they must deal with each and every day — to try to escape the boredom.
That was the origin story behind Sato, the artist who created the Satoverse. Sitting at an office chair day in and day out, he found some temporary reprieve from the boredom of the office whenever he brought pen to paper. In between the phone calls and the meetings that never quite filled enough time in his day, he began to doodle.
These idle moments at his desk became the time for him to escape into the Satoverse. It became a daily ritual to entertain himself and his friends. Each and every day he’d draw something to pass the time and he’d send a picture to his friends. He gradually honed in on a style, eventually finding his own spin on the classic character of Pepe the Frog. Soon after finding his stride, drawing the ‘Sato Frog’ became almost second-nature to him.
Whether taking inspiration from whatever he watched that week or sometimes even finding inspiration in the mindlessness of the work environment, drawing the Sato Frog opened up an unseen connection between his mind and the paper. The characteristics of the character became so internalized that he could draw almost without thinking, as if the character himself was making the decisions on how he would be materialize that day. Sato thinks that some of his very best pieces have been born from some of his most mindless days of drawing.
The art became an expression of whatever feelings traversed his mind that day. The Satoverse became almost a visual journal for all the daydreams, thoughts, and emotions that defined each day at the office.
The style of the art is as organic as it gets. Sato has no misconceptions about his artistic limitations. He doesn’t consider himself a “technically skilled” artist. He isn’t the person to go to if you’re looking for photorealism. Yet this is what makes the art so authentic. He’s forced to work within his constraints and finds a way to get his thoughts onto the paper through only what he’s capable of. This is where the charm of the work really shines through.
At the start of his journey, this art was created simply for himself and a few friends to enjoy, but over time he started to feel that these pieces might be appreciated by a larger audience. He wanted his body of work to speak for itself. He began to hear suggestions from people to move this project forward as an NFT collection, but it took some time before finding both the confidence and the environment for bringing this collection to a blockchain. With his first foray into this space, he decided to bring the Satoverse into the world as a free mint, and let the community decide where the value lies. Spoiler alert — they found a ton of value.
The positive reaction to this collection is unsurprising for art like this. The main character of the Satoverse is one that already exists in the collective consciousness of all of us internet-minded people. The memetic power of Pepe the Frog has proven itself and become a staple of internet culture. He exists almost as a universal being. He can be used in any context to make any point or express any feeling… yet he still remains a public good. As silly as it might sound, Pepe is for all of us. That’s why the Sato collection can have 100 totally unique personifications of the character that somehow all find a way to resonate with us.
One of the greatest things about art is its ability to speak for itself. Even if I was to try to put into words what a particular piece means, the true conversation is always directly between the art and the audience. Each and every piece of this collection has something specific to say to you if you’re willing to go have that conversation. That’s up to you to take on.
If you take that moment to stop and appreciate this collection, its almost inevitable that you’ll find some joy in it. At the very least, you’ll likely find the layers of transmutation as fascinating as Sato does himself. I mean… it is a bit wild. We’ve got a memetic symbol that weaseled its way into the minds of an entire generation. A combination of boredom and time led one of these minds to transpose his own fruition of the character onto paper, photograph it, and upload it onto the internet, originally as an infinitely reproducible image. All of this led down the path to its final form as a nonfungible digital object with only one owner. If there’s some deeper meaning in this collection, it might be in there somewhere…
About Joepegs
Joepegs is the trusted NFT Marketplace on Avalanche. A home built for creators and collectors from all walks of life, to serve as the cultural hub for premium digital assets. Discover and interact with digital art and culture at Joepegs.