Kirk Finkel, who works under the name untitled, xyz, is an artist and metaverse architect based in Brooklyn, New York.,Trained as an architect and urban designer, he builds modular virtual buildings and immersive digital art spaces using generative and agentic AI.He is the Director of Architecture at the Museum of Crypto Art, where he has designed dozens of virtual exhibition spaces.,
Finkel worked as an urban designer in New York before discovering the Steem blockchain in 2016 and starting SteemTown, a community project that modeled 3D buildings from images of hometowns that followers shared in blog comments. SteemTown evolved into BlockTown, built from repeatable modular parts, and in 2017 Finkel and Michael Lee applied that model in the physical world, crowdfunding cryptocurrency to install Steem Park, a public garden with benches and planters in Brooklyn's Herbert Von King Park. The pair then founded the design lab Sndbox and the blog Creative Crypto, collaborating with teams including DADA, Blockade Games, Dapper Labs and SuperRare, before closing Sndbox at the start of the pandemic. In the summer of 2020 Finkel returned to his old BlockTown files and began modeling again, and untitled, xyz grew out of those late night sessions.
As Director of Architecture at the Museum of Crypto Art, Finkel designed Agora, a virtual museum for the institution's Genesis Collection of 160 early crypto artworks, built inside the VR world Somnium Space. The building's form was based on a 3D QR code pattern, with solid and void sections warped into a helix that draws visitors deeper as they move through crypto art history.His series SPOLIA takes its name from the archaeological term for reusing older architectural elements in new buildings, and applies that idea of interoperability to virtual structures as a way of imagining a metaverse vernacular.
Finkel's work has been shown at “Elsewhere is a Negative Mirror” at Vellum LA in 2022, “DYOR” at Kunsthalle Zürich in 2023, and “City Edges” at Eterno Gallery in Lisbon, where he reimagined the city's tiled façades as modular metaverse structures.,,For the 2024 “PROJECTIONS” exhibition at Galerie Charlot in Paris, Finkel created HALVING, an immersive environment in the Hyperfy metaverse themed around the 2140 Bitcoin halving, where visitors navigate a labyrinth of columns that recall M.C. Escher's impossible structures.His work has also been featured in Taschen's On NFTs: The Hard Code Edition and in Multispace: Architecture at the Dawn of the Metaverse, published by Architectural Design.
