MetaCat

A guide to the metaverse for the Media Majlis exhibition Meta what?, made as a vinyl toy, digital editions and a 1.5 m sculpture.

The Media Majlis at Northwestern University in Qatar built an exhibition around the metaverse, titled Meta what?. It needed a guide: something that could stand for a place most visitors had never been. Cats are the unofficial mascots of the internet, so the guide became a cat.

MetaCat was generated from scratch with AI to fit the theme, then refined by hand into a production 3D model. From that one model came a set of illustrations, ten material variants rendered as digital editions for the exhibition screens, a small vinyl toy, a larger limited edition, and a 1.5 m fibreglass sculpture for the gallery floor.

The digital editions were made for the exhibition rather than minted. The plan to release them as collectibles was dropped as too complex for general visitors.