Sasha
Belitskaja
Sasha
Belitskaja
Estonian entrepreneur and artist with a background in architecture and mixed physical reality. Sasha’s installations are remarkable, and her digital creations are pulsing, dancing delights ready to launch us into the metaverse.
Sasha Belitskaja is an architectural designer, extended reality (XR) developer, and digital artist. Her work experiments with space, color, and movement in a way that bridges the gap between the physical world and the digital world. While many of her pieces draw inspiration from familiar shapes, objects, or organisms, they have a surrealist quality that challenges the way we think about traditional structures and architecture.
Belitskaja is originally from Estonia and has a background in architecture, having studied at the University of Dundee and Studio Greg Lynn in Vienna. She has showcased work around the world, with exhibitions and projects in Vienna, Stuttgart, Tallin, Los Angeles, London, Vancouver, and more. Professionally, she has worked in both design and technical roles for development studios, pushing the boundaries of how we experience technology with 3D and interactive content.
Outside of her work with studios such as Bentley Systems and Grimshaw, Belitskaja is also the cofounder of iheartblob, a UK-based extended reality architectural design studio. iheartblob is unique in that they work in both physical and digital design, often blurring the lines between the two.
“Our lives are connected through the phones, which is 2D. But with new technologies, we're able to make our body part of the experience.”
Belitskaja started working in the digital art space in 2021 and quickly fell in love with it. She has since generated over 1,000 NFTs and shows no signs of slowing down. Her NFTs are created with 3D, AR, and VR tools, and many of them have a life-like sense of movement. Some of her projects are AR NFTs that are interactive and responsive.
With iheartblob, she recently won the Tallinn Architecture Biennale, where they created the Fungible/Non-Fungible NFT Pavilion. For this project, users could build their own digital NFT bricks using an online app. Sasha and the iheartblob team then created physical versions of these bricks, which they assembled into a stunning structure in Tallinn. The digital creation process takes inspiration from programs like Minecraft, but brings the structures into the real world while encouraging community involvement and ownership.
Since starting her work in the digital art space, Belitskaja has become an active part of the community, participating in many NFT events and collaborations. She is currently developing a set of 3D rigged avatars called BlobBotz, which will further reflect her interest in 3D organisms.
Whether she’s creating NFTs, working with iheartblob, or tackling completely new challenges, Belitskaja’s work challenges viewers to think about their relation to technology. Right now, most people interact with technology entirely in 2D using smartphones or computers. The XR components of Belitskaja’s work take the technology experience into the third dimension so viewers experience the space around them in a new way.
