foreign [Music] hi everyone really welcome welcome to the second session of ecologies Technologies with Schumacher College it's held with the ma in ecological design thinking and Mona necessary and she cannot be with us today and she's she's doing her field work and does not have an internet connection and also with the group Becky Air Simone Johnson Cassie Robinson and Persephone Pearl who are on the call and many others too uh we started this journey to bring together diverse collectives from many places around the world who are experimenting and working with and in the polycultures of technology and ecology and to share lived experience about their work and how the creative work has has changed Through Time how it has developed how it's been shaped by challenges and really learned something in the effort across all our different places and contexts that might grow solidarity and new Inspirations and new energy um last week we heard from almendra from bioleft which were is a network of plant breeders based in Argentina and she told us about bioleft's work with the seed archive and open source practices and she invited us to plant our own seeds which was her provocation to the group you can find her video recording now of that session on our website and this week it is such an honor to be with the sphere uh with Eric and Lena and actually many people on this call who are connected to the ever-expanding Spheres we will learn about their experimental practices worlding into being new ecologies for circus arts and live art and I guess uh the sphere I will let Eric present and introduce but it is it's a kind of European offering it is uh across Sweden Germany Portugal France and um the there is one thing that I would like to say just uh before uh Eric presents his uh um his offering which is uh something which kept on recurring in some of the more informal meetings we had around ecology's Technologies over the last week which um which was just an awareness of how web3 Technologies are seen and with what they are associated in some particular communities so I think a lot of people here are already very involved with creative digital practice but for those who come with a kind of um ambivalence or skepticism or actually just feel pretty alienated by what web3 is what a Dao a decentralized autonomous organization actually is and what it's worth and and what it offers and to whom I would say we just really Embrace critical perspectives that's really welcome and I think it's clear that there is this Association in the uh the collective with things like crypto scams and uh uh distraction from the real problems facing our environment but there are also these very interesting creative projects that are looking to reinvent value experiments with programmable money that uh actually you know really exploring how to make ecologies uh many diverse ecologies more visible many of these projects are collected in a wonderful book called radical friends decentralized autonomous organizations and the Arts by Ruth Catlow and Penny rafti which gives a sense of a timeline of a a new kind of creative culture that is growing and I really really recommend this book because it just is a testament to how much diversity there is in um in the field and the sphere is one of these projects I think featured in the book but also that has through living through living the experiments uh speaks to the possibilities of um collaborating in fresh ways and the so if if you do come with a kind of skepticism I really invite you to be curious um really curious about what the sphere is doing and how they are creating together and how they're supporting circus artists and live art projects to grow uh so Eric will present this fear and I think reply to almendra's seed provocation and perhaps Elena will tell us a little about the laps the live-action role play game experiments uh with the sphere Community last summer and then we open it up to everyone here to the to the whole group to have a conversation that can go deeper over to you Eric thanks Kate and thanks everyone for joining this this session I I recognize a couple of familiar faces also uh collaborators or like co-creators of the sphere here like Lynette Joel there's also is Carrot still around Katherine yes she is moving around uh she's our adventure philanthropist and residents so a very important member of the sphere community so um well George is coming in should we let him in yes okay so I'm going to like sometimes often people say oh that's here it's such a complicated project so I'm gonna try to start with the very basics of what the sphere is about basically an attempt at creating new modes of funding for the Performing Arts and the circus World more specifically so I will try to give you a sense of how this mechanism for funding functions so I will start with like the infrastructural basis the mechanism that we've created and then uh I I there's too many friends on this call to not like treat ourselves with a little bit of uh joint speculation around what does it mean to create Community slash Collective assets and and that will be a good way I think for for people who are not familiar with the web 3 world to see a little bit the type of considerations that are happening uh in that space so I I will progressively open it up and address all of you basically as uh web3 Community designers because that's really where the the the wealth uh and and the interest really lies so let me share my screen um let's see where am I here I have I have a a bit of a deck um yeah kind of uh I thought I had this presentation share it in the upper armor form yes this presentation is called the sphere digital Souls growing at the Speed Of Trust uh with Lenny we organized a workshop recently over the fall called uh we draw a magic circle and grow at the Speed Of Trust which comes as our last our almost last element in wrapping up the sphere uh choreography of value so what is a choreography of value for this here let me just I think the easiest way is to show you our journey artist Journey as we participate in this year so this fear born out of an encounter between many worlds um the world of uh public collectivism slash Financial activism the world of circus also and the technological world of web3 Slash crypto slash blockchain and it comes also from a desire um I don't know for you guys where you live oaks Turtles uh but from my end of the world coming from Quebec Canada artists have been suffering uh from uh accrued precarisation less and less funding for their activity less and less recognition for their activities and then there's this moment where you're like okay maybe maybe we need to shift perspective maybe we need to stop complaining and about the reduction of the funding for the Arts and start trying to take the matters in our own ends and there's many shortcomings to that approach but still uh and the the time where uh well Joel and I for that matter answered the the the exawar cry or get Loving's war cry this is the age of monetary experimentation we found that there was something to be there's a challenge there that we felt fit to to to to take home so the sphere is born out of that it's born of an encounter between economic Space Agency of which uh Joel is part of of which I was part of Lenny was part of as well so a bit of imagining other forms of economic organizing meeting and actual network of circus artists that has been gathered by sarojanta and David a Swedish Service Company who are really co-founders of the project if I caught myself as the third or the second co-founder the project comes from sarain from the Wilder so we met a magical encounter in Sweden back in early 2018 we were part of an exhibition we here being economic space agency we were part of an exhibition called manipulate the world that was created by AI golden incentive quite famous Financial artists and basically exa's message has always been that we can use web3 affordances crypto to organize ourselves differently that basically economy or even Finance for that matter is a matter of organizing and that's that's the lesson or like that's the message that met salaranta and the builders desire to create a new infrastructure for the circus world to empower them to to to to be creative differently to allow for other types of performances to be to be generated so that's the desire and then we wrote um we wrote A Creative Europe Grant first year we didn't get it maybe we've put the word blockchain too many times uh in in the application back then it was 2018 2019 uh we we tried it again this time with a little bit like I I I'm playing with this word blockchain because a lot of this whole web 3 space uh is is about a certain type of hype there's different types of hype animating this space some of them are just hyper capitalist Ponzi schemes of different types in our case and that's something that has been wonderfully captured by the book radical friends that Kate was mentioning just before there is also within this web2 space a deep seated desire to organize differently to empower cultural organizations of different kinds and and the series definitely proud to be part of radical friends the book and also proud to be part of that ecology extended ecologies of people trying to organize differently in different ways so um so yeah to make a long story short we got the grant it's a three years long Grant we're already in the last year um and it's always been like the sphere is the sphere's Mandate it's to create a prototype for um an infrastructure for funding for the Performing Arts and it's a research creation project uh so so fundamentally it's it's a tech project in the sense that we have been experimenting a lot with the affordances of a web 3 but it's also a research project about what does it mean for artists to organize together and to tackle the difficult question of funding so one thing that I for me is really really important to say is that it's been a extremely stimulating and rigorous project at the same time very playful because there is a there's a challenge with the question of funding uh this is the challenges there's even a trauma when it comes to funding in for the uh the art community uh and most of uh leftist organizers political activists demonize issues economy or finance and they do it for very good reasons and we felt like that's something that withdrawal we've been we've been exploring a lot uh when you start changing the the problematization around Finance when you start assuming what we started calling statscoons the power of statecraft the power to write other types of rules for ourselves in order to finance ourselves differently you literally immediately engage with something like the positive unconscious of our society we meaning you normally don't want to question too much where the money comes from as an artist you rather like use it and make art art that is meant to be um something else than Finance something else that uh the the the state and it's very interesting when a project like the sphere comes in because we are trying to be Artful about the way we question the source of funding and the way that we integrate funding in our own practice so I'm saying all of that because it really matters for the spirit of the project like this project has drawn attention has drawn amazing commitment by so many amazing people because it has tried to tackle the question of funding in an Artful fashion so it's a research creation project in this sense and this is very important to keep in mind and I will come back to that a little bit later so um so this fear the core ID the reason why it's it's a blockchain or a web 3 project is because we imagine it as a place a capacity for accumulating Capital accumulating money and then redistributing the money to the community to the artists that are part of the network also the the model the initial model is very simple it's inspired by the plantoid by Primavera de Philippine which is like a mechanical plant that if you feed it with cryptocurrencies and it reaches a certain threshold itself replicates self-replicates here means if it gets enough funding to to get a new artist and the engineering capacities to create a new mechanical flower then then there is a smart contracts that ensure that the money goes to that new version so we are replicating this mechanism very simple mechanism you put money in this here if it reaches a certain threshold then there's a smart contract that automatically makes an open call for artists to propose new versions of the sphere sorry new new new performances and then we have a governance system that allows for the sphere Community to decide to which performance the funding is going to and so so that's that's really the mechanism the fundamental mechanism is rather simple we use blockchain so that we can manage money in a transparent fashion we can accumulate the funding in a transparent fashion and we can distribute it in a transparent fashion for buy and to the community so it's a funding mechanism fundamentally so this part we can discuss more if you have questions at all but it's fairly straightforward at the end of the day what really matters and what I want to discuss with you today is more the community formation aspect so the whole dream with web3 is that with these new tools we can Empower um collectives networks Trends local transnational networks we can create Proto institutions we can have people uh organizing differently and and hopefully challenge the the the the the the current inertia in terms of how we are organized as large-scale collectives Nations and and so on so there's this vitopia at the heart of the web 3 world at least the one that we are interested in and it's about Community formation so it's it's not that much about the technology I mean the technology I don't want to reduce it because uh it matters a lot to understand what is possible with the technology but it's not the core aspect especially for a non-pro non-for-profit project like this year at least like maybe this year one day in the future can make a profit but it's really not like the main uh the the main goal so what does it mean to gather people around a new way of organizing a new way of founding and that's where we've been exploring a lot the limits like the threshold between Community formation and what we like to call Asset formation uh like how do we create a value Collective and and how do we integrate the enabling constraint of funding in the community formation this is really I think the core the core challenge of this fear and that's why we generated like you can have the you can have the the infrastructure the web3 infrastructure uh but how do you generate the momentum around the project so that there's actual funding coming in like that's really the core the core challenge and that's why we generated in in the second year of the project so last year basically we created a whole funding campaign that we call the karmic funding campaign why karmic you will see it's because we play a lot with the question of we're building digital Souls which is kind of like a a synonym for the Taos the centralized autonomous organization you can call them digital Souls I think it works just the same or maybe even better but anyway like you have the infrastructure it's great you can receive funding why not but then who's going to finance and to which purpose that's that's a core question so the karmic funding campaign has been thought of as an economic engine basically as a way to involve the circus community and the uh the larger audience we call them invested audience to give the audience the possibility to finance new work and for uh the circus Community itself to to generate a new way of uh creating what we call derivative performances so if I show you here yeah the system is fairly straightforward we have we made an open call um late November 2020 to the yeah I need to tell you the whole the whole uh choreography because that's how you can understand how we tackle the challenge of bringing the community in so basically it starts with searches next which is a circus they call themselves a circus label uh basically surface next every year selects a couple of artists across Europe uh Young uh upcoming artists they recognize their work they present it uh in in a special festival and basically the sphere comes in TAPS in the laureates of the last 20 years and makes an open call to all these artists that have won the circus next label over the last 20 years and we say hey what about you revive and derive your performance so Reviving and deriving here you see maybe why we called it the karmic funding campaign we're basically making an offer to artists over the last 20 years Lawrence of circus next to create a new version of their work to offer their work to versioning by other artists so out of that initial pool of artists I think there was like about 100 um 27 answered our call with prepositions for their work to be derived by new artists out of that we selected six works that became what we call our seed performances so these seat performances would lead to new performances created by new artists these seeds performances we created a digital gallery for them online a 3D representation of their work and we went through so so here we are if you go in the artist's Journey uh cycle here uh step number one the digital Soul portal opens summoning C performers this is the call the open call now we are at step number two the enrichment And archiving process enrichment being preparing The Works to be handled through the web 3 world so basically attaching an nft to the world I will talk a little bit about that later and most importantly here artistically speaking the an archiving process which is basically preparing the work to be iterated derived by other artists so you basically you have your work that has already been performed and you need to think of what type of representation of it do you need in order for other artists to create derivations of the world and here you might start seeing like uh yeah you can have a community you can have web 3 you can have nfts but here what we have been thinking of is how do you generate an inner movement within the community so that you create an engine that can create that can generate its own its own movement so the digital Soul here has a primary motor has Aristotle I would say and it and the primary motor is called the anarchive and that's something that the artists part of our community the surface artists have really picked up on and that's that's that's really really uh precious we can we can discuss a little bit more later uh what the an archive is about but basically here it's about preparing your work for future iterations by other artists in the perspective of creating a comments for the Performing Arts a regenerative comments for the Performing Arts where your work can become the seed for future works for other people and yeah there's many things that we can discuss but this was our strategy for avoiding certain problems around IP management and at the same time creating lineages that could gain value over time So Meta gallery opening number three this is basically the exposition of these C performances so that the public can see what these works are about and so that the public can invest in uh in in one of the seed in order to see it being revived and derived so the investment happens through nft basically so we attached an nft non-fungible token that is attached to the work and that can receive Foundry and we have we call them digital wallet that is attached to that it's hosted on gnosis safe so it's a it's a multi-sig wallet so it's a wallet that's governed by the secure Community I mean with representance it's that everyone that controls the wallet but like the idea is that you have a collective governance of the funding um and then you have two ways to finance the sphere here like the main way is through the the crowdfunding and the karmic funding campaign the other way is that we already as a creative Euro project have budget for three performances so even if the karmic funding campaign had not functioned we still had a budget for three performances and this budget has been governed through the mega vote so basically anyone that decides to be part of the sphere uh gains power over the budget that we already had accumulated so that's the mega vote then the funding campaign ends and then uh by that time uh well we know how much money we get so through the karmic funding campaign we got enough budget to uh produce two derivative performances so in total we have two seed performances and three derivatives um and yeah maybe we can discuss more about that later but like basically Andreas Materia working with polyestering as a subject uh he really insists to treat polystyrene as as an agent itself not just as as an object and the other work is room 100 by um Antonia from Split Croatia where she initially worked on schizophrenia expressed from the inside through the means of circus and Bhutto and now in the reenactment that she's going to do of her work uh she's going to work through uh schizophrenia from the outside so Lenny and I just on on Sunday we were at her rehearsal she she's in residency right now at the burden circus festival and we've seen quite amazing images where she's literally working with her skin her face facial skin being pulled by a machine and and giving a sense of like a becoming machinic becoming uh manipulated by by the outside so a very powerful representation of schizophrenia coming up so voila that was so so these are the works um the incubation phase uh it's also very important now that we know how much funding we have we make an open call for new artists to come and present propose variation versions of um of the initial Sid performances so we received I think 15 or 20 new prepositions uh it's it's a very peculiar open call because it's an open call that's based on what we call Love Letters love letters are the address to the Future artists written by the seed performers so we call them love letters for different reasons but basically because there is a process of artistic transmission here happening you know say you want this lineage of uh derivative performance to gain value over time but it needs to make sense here like the the passage between one artist to the other needs to somehow make sense so the art is the seed performer has the power to decide a little bit what type of instructions what are the enabling constraints that will guide the the reversioning of their work so out of that yeah we got the three laureates maybe that I could show you so that yeah okay I will show you that on on a different screen and uh okay let me just see here if I share the screen again [Music] so here we go we have three new six artists so here they are Maria baranas she's creating a variation of Materia the work from Andreas also the budget that we had for for Materia and then we have Cecilia Alice manfrini creating a derivation of a room 100 is work around schizophrenia so these laureates have been voted by the sphere Community through an app quadratic voting app uh and and you can see on the right here the effective votes that they got so that's the that's roughly the the mechanism that we've put in place this mechanism can easily be reproduced in different contexts there's different principles I guess that can be treated differently in other words but we see that as a mechanism for funding that is uh self-sustaining and that can be replicated in other in other art worlds and other in other disciplines um then the question is for us as designer of this ecosystem there's different questions that comes into play one of them is the governance uh not the my favorite world in the world but but it's it's an important word and it basically means the decision-making power that people involved in the community hold and there's very I mean I can't go too far that's where I'm gonna go a little bit more idiosyncratic here so basically uh we after the incubation or like roughly at the same time we had two workshops that addressed the question of governance one is a LARP that Lenny here has designed a wonderful LARP about after the datification of the flesh maybe Laney wants to say a few more words later we'll see um but anyway it was a really interesting event because the challenge as a research creation process working with searches like working with performing arts and I was like you can treat the whole question of funding from a managerial perspective you know and say hey it doesn't really matter who's benefiting from the money but here the whole point is to make circus porous with the apparatus that we're generating like the whole idea of the sphere basically as a research creation process is to see to involve the circus artists the performers into what it means to generate this type of infrastructure for funding so the LARP is a fundamental like fantastic tool for thinking and dreaming together what this apparatus can become and what does it mean for people to even just get initiated to a way of funding like this one you know because there's nothing like I presented as like a fine a finished product but we've worked a lot on getting to that form so Lord Works in many many different ways but one of them is just as an entry point into this year as a world in preposition and then last but not least and again like working in an intensive duo with Lenny um we created uh a workshop around governance like a governance ritual governance Workshop called we draw a magic circle and draw at the Speed Of Trust so here you I will go a little bit deeper if I have time with that but it's like there's a lot going on here when it comes to ecosystem design to worlding uh what does it mean to create a community like the world the word Community is almost uh unbearable at this point in the web 3 space uh because it it it's completely degraded but what does it mean to create enough momentum generate enough interest around a preposition like this here and in the case of the governance here is how do we govern the derivative lineages like if there is a problem if one artist disagrees with one of the variation if three years in time when you're like down the road there's like four iterations what type of governance structure do we have if if we run into problems you know like we had to think a little bit in terms of in legal terms you know um at least at least we felt like we had this responsibility to open up the question of how do we protect the artists that we invoke and invite into the spherical system and how do we accompany them them and their artworks as they generate derivatives over time so these core questions we have addressed we've asked to a series of people that we thought could be uh interesting to interview so so if you're interested on the sphere YouTube channel there's a series of interviews with people legal Scholars mostly of different kinds but like open to this idea of uh that you can't put everything in a contract that that actually the way that you generate consent is really where the value lies and and these generative techniques for for for for opening up the question of consent well that's that's really where there's an Artful uh component to it you know and that's where the rituality of governance comes in so we've been interrogating a little bit the modes of governing uh Dao's uh with with Lenny uh really like it's been amazing work and and that in itself is generating its own derivative Expressions because these are really core questions when it comes to organizing uh communities online all right so Kate how much time left do you can I have like maybe 10 minutes left for for just engaging a little bit further into worlding matters I mean this uh this image you present here is so intriguing I feel we have to and then we can open it out to the conversation with everyone fantastic fantastic just I I feel like uh the whole like Joel knows it all too well like I've been obsessed with the idea of like if you work with economy as as a a design question things need to Loop basically like an economy comes with returns on a return on investment it's like the fundamental and difficult challenge of working with economy um it brings in different like the return on investment what does it mean it brings in all sorts of questions questions of measurement for instance how do you measure the the the the the the input the outputs what's where's the value anyway there is so many questions opened up here but fundamentally with the type of project that the series um yeah with this type of project the value and you've heard it many times if you're in the web free space but the value resides in the community like fundamentally truly in the sphere it's most clear and that Community is fragile and can be actually destroyed like like for real I won't go into details here uh so basically uh I love this is this is a quote from one of the texts from um radical friends from Nathan Schneider from the platform cooperativism um uh Endeavor our friendships and relationships our systems our communities our systems let's practice upwards there's key terms here the idea that friendships and the relationships are systems it makes sense when you take it from an ecosystem design perspective not everything's a system but in that case I think it really makes sense to treat it in these terms um so I'm passing here this is a quote from Ria Myers I can send it to you but basically when you work from an ecosystem design perspective with a living community you're trying to integrate the question of funding basically what a dow does because of the tokenization because of the fact that you are maybe one thing I didn't say is that the whole idea is to have Collective fractal ownership of the performances that are generated through this year so what does collective fractal ownership means it means that you have a piece of the generative process whatever that piece is in the Dow world you call it a token but basically what does it mean to have a token of a performance or like of a creative process I love Ria Meyer's way of defining it here she says it's basically explicating or making explicit the value in values that you're working with and that I think is fundamental this is the enabling constraint of the dial space I would say and it's a bit theoretical but basically it forces you to explicate what you value what you transmit how you how you systematize the the relationship up to a certain extent and some friends out there from the other internet have have theorized very nicely where this value Lies when when you think of communities or web3 based Community as asset formation the value lies in The Vibes so maybe I can read rapidly here what they mean by Vibes but I mean you get a intuitive understanding like The Vibes really matter because that's where the creativity that's where the original Powers will come from so basically they say um that in these the communities the web three communities they call them squads and that's very interesting also in itself so these squads have little use for internal Financial incentives instead playful exchanges produce trust reciprocity and Vibes the ineffable group energy that squads value most accordingly the core of squad production is the continuous production of the squad itself and this looks like nothing you know but like collectives emerge and die all the time so what makes the liveliness of a collective really really matters and this is something maybe we can discuss further together so here evidenced by the power of crypto mimetics rag packs quads of posters have the power to Define new forms of value based on their own esoteric social Frameworks meaning produces assets that cannot be traditionally valued but are capable of commending cultural and economic movement I think this is really well put in terms of where the value lies in a community and a regenerative comments like the sphere um and yeah this focus on the vine there's a lot there because how do you maintain the interest it really matters of the type of Worlds that meet one another in uh in a preposition like the sphere and and and not all compositions are valid or fruitful you can literally kill the vibe for instance if you misunderstand the scope in which you evolve or if you come in with like a very concrete problem that we can discuss more uh in details is that because we're working with technology and with money there is a real danger with this type of project of being sumped by um the magic thinking that comes with technology which is almost like a defining trait of the West you know like the abstract West uh technology and money are so tightly related that it becomes a real issue uh when it comes to uh organizing systemizing relationships and friendships so this is a very delicate issue that the sphere I think has a lot to talk about because we've been genuinely experimenting with money the money form the funding capacities and and this is not easy and it does put quite a weight on the question of the community so yeah I'm putting this uh book from uh here just because as as a way to give keys to people who are interested in plunging further into what the sphere is and has been and could become uh it's the way that we've used the idea of soul and digital Soul as an equivalent for worlding for ecosystem design for something like a whole or an asset taking shape and sustaining itself into time so here uh for instance I I wrote welding is a code word for web3 community-based asset formation we use the word asset which is a bit provocative because we do deal with the question of value and we would love this community to self-value and be able to communicate measure express its value in the world so so we play with the word asset here even though it's kind of a counterintuitive mode of thinking for people that would be like more like traditionally uh dealing with the question of community formation uh so yeah I'm not going to go into details but we I guess I guess we can say we we use the word soul in a fairly rigorous way even though it is openly esoteric but we're playing with that but basically uh but yeah we love to say that we're into digital soul searching as we are exploring the capacities of technology to give new types of affordances to to collectives um and and basically what we mean by Soul here is very resonant with what the other internet has described in terms of Vibes or or maybe to be a little bit more precise here the soul or the digital Soul would be something like a container for The Vibes you know uh even and Beyond the containing capacity it's also an occasion for for self-reflection as you recursively reproduce and and and and precursively uh produce yourself into existence so I like to talk about the sphere as an attempt at Soulful asset formation so Soulful kind of a code word here for for Community for for for the collective and then then I mean this is a great question we can really explore further but like what type of money do you call in what type of money do you summon what type of funding do you summon in will have a direct impact on the shape of the digital soul that you're making for yourself like like literally it's super important question that that's something very practical so here uh when I say um yeah how much are we engaged in the practice of funding as an art form what kind of capital capitals are we envisaging for this year moving forward and that boils down to uh well are we aiming for some sort of venture capitalists funding are we aiming for crowdfunding uh which we did with the the karmic engine but it's it's quite a hassle to do crowdfunding but it's it's it's legitimate or another option here is a venture philanthropists like people that have an interest in art in the art world and that for different reasons are interested in exploring further the question of funding as an art form um and here yeah here we have uh there's a lot to explore on that line but basically the karmic funding campaign was geared around a simple preposition what if you could collect live art on the Paradox of collecting live art or like the Paradox of gathering uh object permanence around something that's fundamentally uh ephemeral so I think I think I said enough about the soul but like if you want to dig further uh I've been very much influenced by the best and guesswork around the issue of where the soul is uh like of course it's not like a substantial conception of the sort of the Soul it's essential in the sense that it is creating an Essentia like a domain for itself maybe I can I can just read this paragraph here it's a definition of the soul that I find extremely stimulating she says the souls not defined by its limitations but rather by what I'd call leaps of the imagination not community of Intuition or appropriation but becoming triggered by something that cannot explain them by the proliferation experienced as such of these extents that are prepositions so like for this year at the more abstract level is how can we be a vessel a hosting capacity for receiving prepositions and turning them into Worlds or turning them into into performances and that are sustainable in time uh yeah here Mark Garrett a distant friend of the sphere he wrote a little uh text that we found extremely stimulating when we were working on the the final shaping of the digital solar this year and it's about like living the proposition what does it mean to to to to embody the technological apparatus that we're setting forth uh and and yeah another point is the question of The Branding The Branding as like again like assuming that we exist in a world where value comes with brands with like certain identities so how do we generate enough of that so that we become recognizable these are all open questions that I hope will will go forward in a way or another and since Joel Mason is here I thought it's always good to to remember the good times uh so he he wrote it was for our first research Workshop in Stockholm about digital comments he wrote everyone can be a loop designer and a fragment catcher in fact we all are all ready to join us here as artists at this stage is to bring the protocols and styles of our practices to order us how to design Loops in the sphere this is research creation artistic research Etc because the Aesthetics of business as usual is a controllable set of separated disciplines and knowledges and we're just not interested in that so two things I want us to remember Loops brings something back fragments are ghosts that stays this is the type of abstract yet very concrete prompts that we've been using that led to the karmic funding campaign as you see it the looping the way that we integrate contingencies fragments of different kinds and how we enrich a community in that way so voila voila I think I think I've spoken enough but yeah thanks thanks for bearing with me because there's a lot there's a lot uh going on in that project and it goes way way beyond the technology that was that the initial trigger I guess oh well thank you Eric it's like always such a poetic offering you bring and um a struggle of your soul it feels and I want to name that in the informal sessions we had last week there was this great struggle around issues of funding coming through various people who were speaking about their work in the world this this phrase you used the trauma of funding is really very real and alive in the groups in in everyone who is connected around how to support new uh events new ways of learning new ways of living and doing together how to support that actually happening when you are in a culture that um uh not always intentionally it it just um some sometimes culture just does not have time it cannot stretch itself cannot like be an organ of support for the fresh needed vital stuff to rise and it feels like the sphere is figuring out uh a Model A A systemic approach a poetry towards um doing that to create these worlds of support that idea of the sphere as being the container of a Vibe I find really interesting and uh artistic it prompts so many images as well as understandings but I do I wondered when you were speaking because we're always up against the financial limits of the culture that we exist in how do you approach the kind of breakage that happens the vibe breakage when people really reach their edges uh especially with the pandemic you know we have had so so much to deal with uh disruptions uh health problems and like really that sense of getting to the edge where human relations can go into conflict and like what is there any thinking in the sphere around peacemaking or what it is that when you you have something a a a a really creative thing going and then there is this like real difficulty and challenge what how do you find your way back to keeping on creating is is is that something you guys have thought of the the whole thing with blockchain and stuff Bitcoin even even though like uh there's lots of critique like Justified about it it made a lot of people around the world start thinking what money is what money is made of and uh and and we live with it and we don't necessarily think about it so to start to think of money as a tool for coordinating people is it seems like nothing but this makes a huge difference and and then you can start approaching the question of funding differently instead of like something that's totally alienating money is always elsewhere you know it's it's like the great the big other you start thinking of it as something that you can have acquaintance with so that's the first step let's look with Joel We were we we called for many years getting a feel of the infrastructure like getting a feel of the infrastructure in our lives means getting closer to what money means in our lives you know and and Beyond also that's also something super important beyond the critique you know beyond the the simple critique of it uh like I totally assume a post-critical approach here like a speculative pragmatist approach is like you can't you can talk about money and it's alienating if I guess not as much as you want there's a moment where there's the the the real comes back in and you write a grant because you want some money to flow in because you need to survive like this this needs to be dealt with at a very intimate level and that was one of the elements that came out very strongly in in the the LARP uh with Lenny like uh what is this we call it the scar of funding and like the trauma funding how do we deal with that collectively you know but but also with uh I like to call it with financial fangs not just as a trauma to recount with but also as something that you can articulate further so yeah the question of money I guess is really fundamental but like to take it as a collective Endeavor not just as like something external I will open audience because now some have have sent me notes they have to leave at quarter past um so anyone who likes to engage with the question it very much open right yes um there's just so much in here it goes off in so many directions there's so much I want to know about so many things um so the thing the thing that I'm really curious about that isn't my question but I just want to plant it as a curiosity is kind of like what does the like what happens to the life of a performance work as it gets turned into an nft like what's the relationship between those two things I just feel like that's a whole other like you guys must have spent so much time thinking and working on that and especially I really love Eric you talking about this kind of getting intimate getting kind of like intimately acquainted with money feels super important especially at the moment so I guess my question connects to that a little bit so the thing that I I'm like really curious about why in your presentation like why you like you talk about transparency as a really kind of fundamental like a reason to use blockchain is because it does transparency around accrual distribution and something else I can't remember what it was um but in your presentation we don't have any graphs or ledgers or actual kind of like setting out what actual amounts traveled in what direction from whom to whom to achieve what and so I feel like we stay in a slightly mystical realm which like all the languages in slightly mystical realm too which I hugely enjoy but I kind of feel like that it would be like is there a reason why you're not like seeing as this as a research project about money is there a reason why we're not talking about figures and we're not using the language of figures like graphs like these kind of horrible volatile like the graphs of everyone winning or losing or you know all this kind of stuff so I can I can answer to that uh we're working on visuals for like getting very clear understanding of what it means to put money in the sphere and where it goes but we didn't manage to have them in time for this presentation but we want to create a new version of the of the website where we will make it very very clear in terms of uh actual money coming in um the the government funding campaign we raised like 11 e or so and basically our unit is uh you need about 10 000 Euros for a performance and that's not that much for a surface performance but hey it's better than nothing so we've chosen 10 000 Euros as our our threshold basically so with 11 eat I back then because it was higher we could manage to finance two performances no not so much but anyway that was that's the money that we gathered so so this whole effort this whole Karma funding campaign uh we find I think collectively that it was not that much money in the end that flew in with all the efforts that we've put uh we can discuss more in details like one of the reasons is because the campaign was made on Twitter because the idea was to attract nft money like the free money that was floating in the nft world back then and we thought we're gonna pull this magic trick surface trick of tapping into that money bring it to like a bit of a Robin Hood move uh because uh basically the community of circus is not on Twitter you know so we had a bit like this is like one of the major critiques that we have to deal with now is that we made a whole crowd funding without a crowd uh and that can go only that far there's different reasons for that one of them again super pragmatic is that this whole web 3 infrastructuring is quite mystical for most people especially for the circus world so it's only now that our partners actually see how they can take they can Empower themselves with the tools that we've created so again like super pragmatically speaking we had to create this first karmic funding campaign so that now the partners see where they fit and they start to be able to adapt this preposition to their own audiences and it's only now so it was quite Kamikaze to go on we went for it it was hard it was hard on us as a collective but now it's nice to see that the community our partners our partners is a concrete people once in Paris Berlin circus Festival in Berlin called datafa in Italy they have their own takes on what it means to create new colleges of funding for for them and uh and it's only now that we've created this whole model that they they can really take up uh like pick up with it so this also matters a lot there would be more to say in terms of accounting but yeah the the mere fact that people are not used to use the web 3 tools is is a major challenge when it comes to a crowdfunding and also in terms of self-governing of a Community we're just not used to that so but yeah I appreciate the remark because we could definitely add a slide of our noses safe multi-safe for instance absolutely absolutely we we have an infrastructure we have membership nfts that are evaluative nfts um yeah we have a whole infrastructure that that oh you asked also how is the nft connecting to the to the the to the live art this is such a good question like a huge puzzle for us um the simple answer is that it's almost like an empty device that allows you to create Collective fractal ownership of a work so theoretically the the the the nft itself could be a blank page that only gives you a piece of a process but of course we try to make it more interesting than that and we're actually working now on a final nft for this year so uh yeah that's that's it's an ongoing challenge for me personally it's the whole choreography of value that matters and the nft somehow should represent that but it's very easy to fetishize nfts you know and to think of them as like little Jewels but in my case I think of them as just a piece and a bigger process and I hope that the communication around them will be geared in that way but it's not only up to me so so yeah let's see let's see where it goes are there any other spherical beings on the call who would like to kind of testify to their experience of um these processes too um I really don't know exactly how to do this I could I could read like a text um I don't know if that's useful but we did like a three day lap um where we did an archived game um where we included like artists to um basically go through the whole stage of Performing and documenting one another to basically create fragments um which were then being Loot and shared in um well yeah I mean there was like a live reenactment of of archives basically and that was seen as something um to be discussed as you know valuable or not valuable and um it like in which way can we wrap this into a contract or into a collective artwork what are the stakes for everyone um involved um that was one part of it another part was a um sort of creation of a living map of um let's say entangled values um that people were projecting onto the sphere and into the potentialities that the sphere could bring in the future and um this is also where the the scar of funding came into our um yeah into our culture perhaps at this point I don't know maybe was there already before but um we had someone well I forgot to say that so as we were finding these different concepts that were part of this sort of like you could call it value map but that's not really the right way to put it I think um because they're basically just um you know concepts of players in a system that are usually um not necessarily so visible um so um so yeah the scar funding was one of them and they were being embodied by uh the artists and by the audience so um yeah it was quite interesting because it had quite an immersive effects on the people and um and in the end our healer of the scar funding actually won the price um so Maria is our seed artist now um a Lithuanian circus artist that Eric also mentioned in the previous presentation so that was I think not a coincidence um as these ancestral spatial Technologies like never are really so so I guess they really um catalyzed I think they're really like laughs um act really as catalyzers um yeah and I think we're still um feeling the consequences of that Joel thanks for sharing some pictures from the Lord there is one from Anika right here uh it was it was such a gorgeous uh gorgeous moment and Anika is researching the sphere as part of her PhD and what an entry she she happens to start her research by attending the the LARP itself which was like yeah an incredibly Rich experience I've also just shared Lenny the The Prompt that I thought maybe you wanted to read it's basically the speculative prompt that triggered the the three days of the LARP uh I I don't know then if you want to read it or but it sorry um I I could do I don't know if that's enjoyable for everyone um we have done it as a sort of like guided meditation um in 2033 the art world has gone through a severe transformation now we could track everything no emotional labor went unrecognized as it gets registered on the blockchain and every relation every idea every gesture can be archived and turn into an asset often called a community we perfected the art of turning our work and ourselves into nfts we were banking on performances just as other people were banking on words or attention some people became really good at it too good actually they extended the curse of self-ownership like only few Libertarians would ever dream of they became replicas in the metabus lost souls or rather lost bodies around them the future felt useless and so damn expensive they were talking about having skin in the game but actually couldn't feel the play anymore the precarity of our flesh became an urgent matter the question became how do we get our bodies back so is it so is the question and there's something about hearing like the pairing of um hearing a week when you speak about the project sometimes it becomes Sublime philosophy or like um uh just Cosmic poetry and then with the the images of the larps you get this sense of the intimacies and the uh the informality and just relationship building and experimenting with movement and uh where you are situated and this is like a true way of learning it it it feels um that it feels like there's a Direction coming through this new work that is super exciting super rich um Joel did you have anything to to uh bring um because you were such a fantastic presence to connect with in the informal session uh last week and yeah really appreciate your presence thank you yeah it's so good to be here um nice to see everybody and meet everybody um yeah I have something that popped up at the beginning of the session that is still kind of with me and and you know I'm and it's and it's because I'm I'm I'm not working with the spirit right now I'm working with the post-capitalist project economic space agency Labs um and so I've been I guess part of the reflection is this work is is like any of our work it's it's hard it takes a toll and when you're in it and I think especially the stuff that everybody describes so well when you're also on one side you know kind of basically like you know having your autonomous autonomous friends that you came up with like oh this is this is good like you know maybe maybe something you should consider even to deepen the conviction but you have to take it from there and then also take it from the obviously the the other side of it uh and also being like not capitalist and not for the majority of the crypto sphere and then uh um so I guess I guess that's part of what I was Reflections that I can reflect on the sphere whereas I'm not sure these guys are in the midst of it still you know and have just produced it and they're so just I'm grateful for this space that you're holding okay to also love on these projects and loving the people that uh stay with them um so the on one one reflection that I had now that I have some is that I worked more on the inner archive or stuff earlier on like how to package and box performances and and work with these folks uh with Eric and then and others and uh and I guess my reflection now looking back on it is that it's interesting that we had to go into the artistic practices themselves and pull them apart with the artists in order because because the way that they were already packaged was in a way to try to defend themselves by engaging with the Capital Market as is so the circus is encoded as a profit making um art right now you know and so it's a it's a it was a whole thing to when it wasn't just oh how do we take these moves how do you how do you how do you have a grammar of Dance but uh but of course the economy of dance sort of circus or writing it's already woven into the practice of the thing and uh and so now when I look back on these um in archiving uh games that we wrote It's like oh we were doing a lot more than just helping them you know transcribe which I knew then too but now looking back at it specifically an economic point I think I'm trying to make and to go into your own artistic practice what is already kind of like molded and mangled about how how it is expected to be measured by the capital market and and how is this work kind of about going into the practice of art itself each practice and saying what about this needs to be expressed differently and I think that I wish I could have been there for that large because the pictures are so therapeutic and they kind of bespeak some of like the the way in which Maybe when we start to talk about how much we go through as artists in practices that are hooked into these systems um you know it almost doesn't bear saying every day 24 hours a day so we stop but then if we start to articulate that an archiving and repackaging it to be measured by a different thing by a collective you know like and having that actually Loop economically so it's just a bit of a reflection I'm really appreciative to I always love hearing you guys spin it and uh so I'm just feeling glad to
2023-02-18