NFTabled: ART COLLECTIVES & TECH
Dialog, a monthly series, invites experts from varied geographies to be part of online, moderated panels. Dialogs are interactive online sessions, where speakers discuss exciting new possibilities at the cusp of art and technology with each other as well as with a public audience drawn from wider social media publicity promoted by our partners and supporters.
The upcoming three part mini-series from March to May 2022 is focused on NFTs, Cryptocurrencies and DAOs in an effort to unpack this new frontier keeping in mind their special implications for the creative collectives and practices at the intersections of technology and art.
This mini-series is designed to announce and present our most recent project in the AI and techart space - the RadBots. RadBots, a NFT collection of conversational video bots, has been created by some of the finest theater, museum and literary professionals based in India, UK and Germany boldly experimenting with AI based techart. RadBots is a radical experiment in modern collectivism and responsible crypto.
Participants of this project chose to form a collective that would pool 30% of NFT sales of their RadBot proceeds to their DAO called RADAO, whose charter is to fund further techart experiments. RADAO enables its members to submit and vote on funding proposals. Membership into the RADAO will include the RadBot Creators, Buyers and the RadBots themselves. Yes, the machines will have a say on what causes the money made from their sale is spent on!
Meet the RadBots here: https://dara.network/RadBots
ABSTRACT
Imagine a vehicle of organizational management that is truly democratic, transparent and allows for collaboration with people all across the globe with great management ease and financial accountability.
NFTogether: Art Collectives & Tech, features leaders in techart, NFT* and DAO** creation and curation, to better understand why DAOs such as Dara’s RADAO are fantastic vehicles for creative collectives.
The politics of the art market have incentivized artists to collectivise to maintain their right to livelihood outside of this ecosystem since the dawn of modernity. These motivations are often merely footnotes in art historical narrative. Despite the best of intentions, notable individuals and collectives that have worked towards creating alternative methods of dissemination and self-valuation towards the sustenance of their artistic production, have had their practices and politics co-opted within market mechanisms. Trust between stakeholders is an acute hindrance to sustained collective action towards liberation from dominant narratives, particularly with regard to the relationships between individuals within such collective efforts and the persons who might hold their collective purse strings.
Of the many promises blockchain technology makes to the world, a key process that seems to be revolutionizing the niches of the cryptoverse, and by extension the world at large, is the exclusion of trust as a requisite for agreement. It imagines a world where one does not have to trust the motivations of possible collaborators because digital code can ensure transparency and accountability based on pre-configured and immutable parameters. The DAO has become the organizational framework that manifests this vision since it was proposed and on its back, a number of collectives, representing various creative and social endeavors, have emerged to dream of a world where act of collectivising does not require any possibly dissonant intermediaries to be realized.
*NFT or “Non-Fungible Tokens” are digital files such as artworks, with unique signatures embedded within them, that act as proof of authenticity.
**DAO or “Decentralized Autonomous Organization” refers to a non-traditional management system that is facilitated by a computer code embedding certain rules agreed upon by the DAO’s members.
