Russian poet and artist Vasily Popov has found an unusual way to give a digital artwork a history of its own: he sent it into orbit. A piece from his NFT collection “Entities Meta” spent roughly six months aboard the International Space Station before returning to Earth, which Popov describes as a first for NFT art.

For Popov, the flight ties together three long-running interests: poetry, space and digital technology. He presents the project as an argument that a digital object can carry meaning not only through scarcity on a blockchain, but through what it has actually been through.

From poems to NFTs

Popov started making digital art in 2021, during the peak of the NFT market. He had long drawn and painted alongside his writing, but says the digital format let his images stand on their own for the first time.

The result was “Entities Meta”, a collection he calls “expressive-naïve art”: quick, intuitive images that, in his words, arrive “like flashes”. The series is listed on the OpenSea marketplace.

Six months in orbit

The space project took shape the same year. On March 18, 2022, Soyuz MS-21 lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome with the crew and a physical art object by Popov on board. The work, titled “Space”, remained on the ISS for about half a year.

After its return, “Space” became the central piece of “The Art of the Possible”, an exhibition of 16 works at the Central Museum of Communications in St. Petersburg about creativity and science in a high-tech world.

Popov frames the trip as a kind of initiation for a digital object, comparing it with old traditions of taking objects to sacred places to give them meaning. The point, he argues, is that the work’s value comes from a verifiable experience, recorded both on the blockchain and in photos from the station, rather than from the rarity of its pixels.

The artist also says he met Elon Musk in Indonesia and handed him a video of the artwork’s flight.

Next: a garden of poetry

In 2024, “Entities Meta” was named Best NFT Collection at the Crypto Awards. Popov’s next plan is a “World Garden of Poetry”: a physical park where each tree is dedicated to a classic poet and visitors walk through themed alleys about love, nature and philosophy while listening to verse, with digital technology used to preserve the poets’ legacy.

The project is still at the concept stage. Details are published on the collection’s website.