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Meta Has Significantly Downsized Open Arts, Its In-House Art Team, as Part of Its Largest Round of Layoffs Ever
Very last week’s round of 11,000 layoffs at Meta seems to have gutted Open up Arts, the company’s artwork and style and design division, formerly known as Fb Open Arts. Because Meta declined to remark on this story, it remains unclear how large the division was pre-layoffs, or how deep the cuts went, but a deep dive on LinkedIn implies it was a thing of a blood tub. “You could have heard that Meta laid off 11,000 people today past 7 days. I was regrettably a person of them. As was most of my (magnificent) Open up Arts firm,” Matthew Israel, the former chief curator of Open up Arts, wrote…
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‘A weird meta experience’: artist has @metaverse handle restored after Meta disables it | Technology
Thea-Mai Baumann’s Instagram profile is an eclectic mix of pink-lipped selfies, David Bowie memes, colorful recordings of her hologram artwork, shots of skyscrapers in Shanghai and portraits of friends tinted in Valencia, Amaro and Toaster, all filters from Instagram’s early days. Baumann’s account, which operates under the handle @metaverse, features 10 years of her life and work. All that became inaccessible to her when she suddenly found herself disabled from her account on 2 November, days after Facebook, which owns Instagram, changed its umbrella corporate name to Meta. A message flashed on her screen: “Your account has been blocked for pretending to be someone else.” As Facebook’s corporate name change…