FAKEWHALE in conversation with Jan Robert Leegte
On the occasion of the upcoming exclusive Fakewhale-curated release Walled Garden, launching June 5 2025 at 6:00 PM CEST / 12:00 PM EDT, Fakewhale sat down with Dutch artist Jan Robert Leegte to discuss the conceptual framework behind a project that brings the NFT medium into an unexpected, highly conceptual space: a single, immersive, photorealistic digital garden that challenges the conventions of crypto-art collecting.
Built in JavaScript using Houdini and Babylon.js, Walled Garden unfolds as a real-time generative system, structured across 150 editions minted on Ethereum via a custom smart contract, available at walledgarden.leegte.org.
The conversation explores the genesis of the project and Leegte’s approach to key issues such as digital ownership, ecological simulation, and the architectural logic of networked presence.
Fakewhale: The Garden reimagines the concept of an NFT collection as a shared, continuous ecosystem rather than a series of individual objects. What inspired you to overturn the dominant model, and what kind of experience were you aiming to create for collectors with this shift?
Jan Robert Leegte: In 2023, I released Web, a collection of 1,000 interconnected web pages, where each NFT was hyperlinked to others, forming a smart contract-based network. It was my first attempt to introduce relationships within the typically isolated cloud of tokens. With The Garden, I wanted to go a step further, creating social awareness among the works themselves. Instead of each collector owning something entirely separate, I wanted the collectors to be part of something together, instead of being part of something alone.
The garden can only be viewed through 150 openings distributed along a circular wall, with each viewpoint corresponding to an NFT. How did you develop the idea of perspective as a metonym for ownership? What reflections were you hoping to provoke about the relationship between vision, access, and possession?
Framing a fixed perspective allowed me to comment on the standard generative model used in many NFT collections. Rather than generating entirely distinct works, I created unique compositions by altering the camera angle, height, and position around a single, unified environment. This spatial approach lets individuality emerge through viewpoint, while maintaining connection. It also introduces the presence of the “other.” Ownership becomes positional, you’re not just holding a token, you’re taking a place. In its own way, The Garden brings the social elements of Discord and marketplaces into the artwork itself.
By including the collector’s name or wallet address in each visual frame, every viewer becomes both observer and observed. How does this choice relate to the performative and voyeuristic dimension you’ve described, and what implications does it have for digital identity?
The wall openings function as digital viewports, similar to a screen, a browser window, or a piece of interface design. It’s through these frames that you experience the living software, while simultaneously being represented by your address or name. There’s something inherently performative in collecting NFTs, it’s no longer private as in traditional art collecting, but public, social, and often self-conscious. In The Garden, ownership implies visibility. You’re part of the scene, not just watching it. It’s a quiet commentary on the exhibitionism and voyeurism built into Web3 culture, an ecosystem where looking and being looked at are inseparable.
What role does nostalgia play in shaping this virtual space and in the relationship between humans and simulated nature?
I’m not sure if it’s nostalgia, but there is certainly a romantic thread running through the work. We still respond deeply to natural environments, you can hike through the mountains and feel that visceral connection. The Garden taps into this longing. Simulated nature, as we know from games, CGI, and AI-generated landscapes, has become a space in its own right. Much of my work explores the ontology of nature as mediated by the networked computer. But in this piece, that mediated nature also becomes theatrical, it sets a stage for the collector to perform in, much like in Duchamp’s Étant donnés.
Although the garden is immersive and photorealistic, it remains uninhabitable, visible but not directly experienceable. In a time when the natural world is increasingly mediated by technology, The Garden seems to evoke themes of desire and loss. How central is this tension between “looking” and “touching” in your practice?
That tension is central. I was trained as a sculptor, and the question of “touch” continues to center my work. From scrollbar sculptures to button drawings, I’ve always been drawn to the clumsy but intimate relationship we have with interfaces. The screen seduces us, but also holds us at a distance. In The Garden, the addition of the wall makes this dynamic even more explicit. You’re aware of your separation, the wall being an interface in itself. That distance brings the digital experience back into material terms, it becomes tactile again. It makes you self conscious, and through that you become more aware of being in that space between body and digital.
The sculptural scrollbar at the center of the garden introduces a cryptic element, part readymade, part relic. What does this object represent within the work? Is it a symbol, an interface, or an anomaly?
Exactly that, it’s all of those things. To me, the scrollbar is the “nude” in Étant donnés. It links back to something outside the wall. But it’s also a poetic gesture.
How does this piece fit into your broader artistic trajectory? And if you’d like, feel free to share some of the directions you’re currently exploring.
This project may feel like a radical shift for some collectors, but it’s deeply rooted in the themes I’ve explored throughout my practice. Mediated nature is one of the central threads in my work, it’s how I understand the networked computer. It ties into generative art, the structure of the internet, and our broader digital condition. I’ve worked with game engines before, and you can find those projects on my website, but this marks a new level of integration for me in Web3. I want to use this phase to push the medium for myself.
This year, alongside The Garden, I’m working on a custom blockchain artwork that interacts with Web2 infrastructure, as well as a purely generative audio-based piece. For me, Web3 is still just beginning and continues my decades long story of being committed to net art.
fakewhale
Founded in 2021, Fakewhale advocates the digital art market's evolution. Viewing NFT technology as a container for art, and leveraging the expansive scope of digital culture, Fakewhale strives to shape a new ecosystem in which art and technology become the starting point, rather than the final destination.
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