In January 2022, multidisciplinary artist Ed Fornieles partnered with art curator Sam Spike to bring the NFT version of a Tamagotchi (the once popular handheld digital pet) to life. Fornieles designed “Finiliar” as a collective of cute, tiny creatures that draw inspiration from the chemical reaction that sprouts when a person sees a baby. Over the years, the team behind the creatures has shortened their name from “Finiliar” to “Fini.” 

In 2024, Fornieles is taking one step further into the Fini World by bringing his audience behind the scenes on how he illustrated each Fini, their families, and their different moods and expressions. In “Fini Sketches,” Fornieles shares 25 Fini sketches and storyboards that add context to the original 2022 collection. 

Below is more on how Forieles first developed Fini and how his start in character-development performance art paved the way for the Fini-universe. 

Introduction to Finiliar

Finiliar is an NFT collection created by British multidisciplinary artist Ed Fornieles. Each Finiliar acts like a digital pet that reacts to real-time cryptocurrency market changes. The collection uses data oracles to track the performance of specific cryptocurrencies. When a currency drops in value, the Finiliar shows signs of sadness or illness. When the currency rises, the Finiliar appears happy and energetic.

Fornieles linked each Finiliar to a different cryptocurrency, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and others. This direct connection between digital art and live financial data makes Finiliar unique in the NFT space. Collectors find this emotional responsiveness engaging because it adds an interactive layer to ownership.

Since its launch, Finiliar has attracted strong interest from NFT enthusiasts and digital art collectors. In this article, we explain how Fornieles developed the concept, the creative process behind the collection, and the impact Finiliar has had on the NFT community.

Ed Fornieles created Finis 6 years before he brought them to Finiliar Studios and the NFT world

Fornieles did not get his start in the web3 art world. The London-based artist earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Ruskin School of Drawing in Oxford and a Masters of Art in sculpture from the Royal College of Art in London. He put both degrees to good use since the beginning of his career. He exhibited different sculptures, videos, and interactive performance art pieces that mostly challenged onlookers to consider new perspectives about social influence, pop culture, and the power of communities.

For example, in one performance art piece, he hosted an evening with 300 people to whom he assigned characters and tasked them to play them all night through improvisation. Early in his career, he revisited the theme of the American college experience in many of his works because he was fascinated with how much it pulled together the individual and community experience.

As social platforms (like Facebook and Tumblr) rose in popularity, he also turned his artistic eye towards social norms, online communities, and how the external social world impacts an individual’s life personally.

In the context of those previous performance pieces and exhibits, Fornieles created Finiliar, a 2016 gif tethered to an RSS feed of different currencies that shifted the creature’s mood as the currencies fluctuated. Fornieles started exhibiting the original Fini through multimedia installments across galleries from New York to Tokyo beginning in 2016. The Finiliar NFTs adjust their moods based on the linked cryptocurrencies, with changes occurring at different intervals such as once an hour, twice a day, or once a week.

In an interview with web3 publishing platform Mirror, Fornieles explained:

“They were these cute embodiments of data that existed, using RSS feeds and large screens, sculptures and some film work. But they were limited to the people who enter a gallery space or can afford an expensive piece of work. What I saw in NFTs was the possibility that a piece of work might have an intimacy with thousands of people, and not just a few.”

After a chance meeting with art curator Sam Spike at an art festival, Fornieles decided to partner with Spike to develop Fini World, an NFT collection, app, and media company that ultimately expanded the Fini universe starting in 2022.

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The Fini World extends beyond the 10,000-item living NFTs collection

Fini World includes multiple NFT collections, a messaging app, and social media videos that contextualize the Fini World lore. 

“Finiliar” is Fini World’s genesis NFT collection. The collection includes 10,000 PFPs across ten different “families” or types of Finis. Fornieles tethered each Fini family to a cryptocurrency so that the Fini’s mood fluctuates depending on the specific cryptocurrency’s activity on any given day. The ten cryptocurrencies include Avalanche, Binance, Bitcoin, Chainlink, Dogecoin, Ethereum, Polygon, Solana, Tezos, and Uniswap.

In his 2024 NFT collection, “Fini Sketches,” Fornieles describes and shares illustrations of how he assigned personalities, styles, and unique features to each Fini family so that each set could feel like its own Fini subgroup. 

“Within these families, there are clans and small groups that echo a society with some having leaders, some being more democratic, others more human and real, while others are sci-fi and strange, or abstract and glooping,” explains Forieles in an interview with digital art marketplace Verse.

In a thread on the official Fini World X account, the project also explained: 

“Finiliar reveal the emotional bonds that exist between us and the vast sets of data that rule our lives. The audience is larger than crypto, spanning all ages, as we have seen in some of our friendly competitions where collectors’ children have entered.” 

As the Fini World grows, Fornieles is banking on community experience still being a tentpole for his work and the Fini World. With the Fini app Oom, for instance, the Fini team encourages deeper conversations between Fini holders, encouraging them to “skip the small talk” while also gamifying Fini ownership because the more you engage on the app, the more your Fini grows—a nod to how connection and community are a life source in the NFT world and beyond.