The founder of DeviantArt is making a $22,000 display for digital art

Summary

Angelo Sotira started the online digital art platform DeviantArt when he was just a teenager, growing a formative community for millions of artists in the 2000s. Twenty-five years later, Sotira wants to change digital art again, but with a focus on the way it’s displayed. On Thursday, Sotira revealed his new venture, Layer, a screen specifically designed to showcase digital art in the best quality possible. “The way that the canvas needs to perform and behave in your life is quite different than other types of displays,” Sotira told TechCrunch. “It needs to blend into beautiful environments.” The closest point of reference that the average consumer would have for a product like this is Samsung’s The Frame TV, which looks like a painting hung on the wall when it’s not turned on. But Layer takes that kind of feel to an even more premium level — unlike The Frame, Layer is not a consumer product, and it’s not trying to emulate static paintings or photographs. “They’re $22,000, so that kind of tells you a lot about who that’s for,” Sotira said. “We spared no expense and we spared no effort. We made no compromise in producing what is actually, in our opinion, the very best way to display digital art on a wall.” Image Credits:Layer When Sotira talks about digital art, he isn’t talking about digital photography or videos. Layer is working with hundreds of artists like Casey Reas, who makes generative AI art — no, not the kind of generative art you get from ChatGPT, which is created with LLMs that use other artists’ work without their consent. Instead, many of these artists are writing their own software to create digital AI artworks that change over time according to what the code says. But these artworks, like most AI software, require a lot of computing power to execute. That’s part of why Layer is so pricey — it needs the technological capacity to display these new kinds of works. “You’re looking at an over 35-year history of extraordinary artists developing the medium o...