Artifacts
We
believe in the value of speculative, experimental work that expands the bounds of collective possibility, imagination, and agency.
aim to develop artifacts that combine philosophical and cultural work alongside technical tooling and infrastructure to advocate for new digital norms and practices. The majority of our work falls into these three (non-exclusive) categories:
- Artifacts as tools and infrastructure
- Artifacts as statements
- Artifacts as play or art
Below are some of the artifacts that we have released into the world.
11/08/2021
A Declaration of the Interdependence of Cyberspace
A Declaration of the Interdependence of Cyberspace
We want not just independence, but interdependence.interdependence. Today we sit at another inflection point in the trajectory of the web. This work was precipitated by Facebook's rebranding as Meta, & is a direct fork of Barlow's Declaration, a foundational cyberpunk text.which describes dreams for a freer cyberspace, but today we find his document insufficient. We're interested in the poetics of infrastructure, or how the different parts of a software object come together and produce effects on the viewer. Viewers are able to either signsign (A signature is not removable. It's an alliance with the values, infrastructure, and labour behind the piece) or forkfork (A fork is a productive step forward, a defining of an alternate vision) the declaration.declaration, all of which lives on Arweave.Arweave. We wanted to show the beauty of a non-financial use of blockchain, & also ensure that the experience was accessible. This work is authorless because it is authored in the spiritual sense by many more people than we could feasibly name.many more than we could name here. We owe debts to communities that we are part of, teachers who have guided us, and ancestors in various lineages that we now steward.
02/09/2022
Pluriverse
Pluriverse
The Pluriverse artifact is a call to imagine, steward, and create a digital pluriverse.pluriverse: a world in which many worlds may fit. We offer this work as a values-laden alternative to the Metaverse. We imagine a transition from the monocultures and monopolies of the present to a flowering of worlds and possibilities. We see the digital pluriverse as a space of regenerative scale and co-creation, that can challenge illegitimate power through a mosaic of communal, alternative, and autonomous cultural and economic worlds. The pluriverse is a collaborative project.collaborative project; our hope is to provide the beginnings of an architecture that may facilitate and support this process of co-constitution. For this, we turn to pattern languages.pattern languages: modular, structured without prescription, and targeted towards practical design. We are excited about the potential of these pattern languages for enabling communities to define their own values in ways that are participatory, repairable, maintainable, and evolving, and to apply principles to concrete organizational and technological decisions. We invite you and others to plant and garden these seeds, so that this language may grow.grow, evolving through intention and use, like all living languages. We hope this may lay the groundwork for building tangible instantiations of a shared pluriversal vision.
04/26/2022
Shapeshifting Poetry
Shapeshifting Poetry
This is a living library of shapeshiftingtransformingmorphingevolving verses, created by the verses community because we wanted to explore mediums for software poetry.software that allows for different kinds of poetry.software that enables different kinds of beauty.poems and art and technology and different combinations thereof.creating beautiful technology.creating beautiful things with beautiful people :) These poems are written using a technique called telescopic text which initially was done for a very functional reason, allowing writers to display a high-level summary for more context that dynamically appears as the user desires, a form of in-line footnotes. But what about text that changes for the sole purpose of changing, or for purely poetic reasons?How does meaning shift as the text changes with engagement?How can the reader create, and choose, their own meaning as they explore in the textual landscape?Most interestingly, how would this new affordance shape what kinds of verses people feel moved to, and able to, write?
06/11/2022
Constitutions of Web3
Constitutions of Web3
Although smart contracts are promising new tools for governance, they alone cannot govern communities; traditional constitutions and declarations of rights are still crucial for good governance. In collaboration with Metagov, this artifact is an essay,analysis of constitutional documents which examines professed rights and values and places DAO constitutions in context wtih digital constitutions more broadly, dataset,a dataset of various DAO constitutions, guide,guide which contains recommendations for beginning to draft constitutions, and template.andand, when combined with the guide and our data set of constitutions, will serve as a template for creating constitutions.
