Public Nouns

Summary

4 ETH to fund a NFT/Blockchain research-focused art residency at Chateau du Fey in France, Burgundy, called GLITCH. We are hosting a 2-week residency for artists, musicians, NFT protocol designers, AI artists, metaverse platform builders, token economists, researchers, and philosophers.  The multidisciplinary gathering at Glitch is an opportunity to experiment with new forms of collective creation, remixing, and distributing art. We think there is a unique opportunity to build new types of public goods during Glitch, where blockchain engineers, AI and blockchain artists can collaborate on the creation of new NFT collections that actually explore the use of REMIX NFT that was developed at GLITCH 2021, and more fair and equitable redistribution models for artists. We will also work with artists and musicians on applying the new open source NFT Token-Bound Licensing  standard which was developed at Glitch 2022 for embedding Creative Commons-like licensing conditions directly into the NFT.

Core team members

• Isaac Patka
• Primavera De Filippi
• Ooli Shannon De Villèle
• Will Papper

What is GLITCH

GLITCH is a two-week focused residency at an 18th century chateau in France. About 30-40 participants will be invited to create, imagine, develop theories, build projects and standards aimed at supporting a new creative ecosystem of open creativity and digital abundance in the blockchain art world.  The participants will be a highly curated group of creative and smart individuals actively engaged with NFTs, art, music and AI. The goal is to bring the right people, in the right place, at the right time, and then let the magic happen. At GLITCH, we strive to empower people with ideas, visions, and expertise, while providing space for our attendees to reach deep into their minds and forge better models together. We exist to disrupt the status quo and to manifest positive solutions for society. The outcomes of the residency will be, first and foremost, a tight community of value-aligned people eager to collaborate with one another, new collaborations and synergies in order to shape the world of tomorrow. The residency will also promote a variety of new initiatives about how to promote the value of openness and interoperability in the blockchain art world. Expected deliverables include new NFT protocols that encourage remix and creativity, new NFT protocols geared towards maximization of social and environmental impact, as well as a variety of collaborative exhibitions for NFT artists. All content produced within the residency will be released and made available to all under Creative Commons licenses.

Why did you decide to build it

The NFT landscape is still struggling to provide the new opportunities it has the potential to create. Existing NFT platforms are driven by commercial purposes, and miss the objective of providing an interoperable ecosystem for openness and creativity. Alongside this, creative practices within the NFT are yet to be perfected, often focusing mainly on speculation, and lacking the desire to rely on open and interoperable standards. To make things worse, many of NFT platforms do not provide for the proper licensing of digital assets to their participants, and instead establish terms of services that remain under the exclusive control of the platform operators. Many NFT collectors are just following the trend, eager to pump and dump digital artworks, which they can “shill” on the secondary market, in order to earn money from speculation. We need dedicated individuals to research their use cases and the ways in which blockchain and NFTs can contribute to more creativity and collaboration, how they can enact a striving economy of digital abundance, how NFT platform should be structured to become more interoperable, which standards they should adhere to, and how they should be governed so that members can be protected and engaged to participate in this new environment.

GLITCH aims to bring together the brightest individuals contributing towards or researching the use of blockchain in art to produce standards, philosophies, research or products that tackle some of these key societal issues. GLITCH also aims at gathering artists, musicians, performers, etc. to collaborate in the production of collaborative pieces, jamming together in order to brainstorm novel ideas and generate new content. It is hosted at chateau du Fey - a place that has become the home of an intentional community of artists, thinkers and activists over the past 4 years (http://feytopia.com), and within which participants can remain undistracted from outside forces.

About the event

Participant Count

There will be 30-40 active Participants including the core team committee members for a duration of two weeks (Oct 23 - Nov 5). Each of these will be carefully selected to contribute to the extitutional framework by being active and engaged artists, thinkers, builders, or entrepreneurs.

Agenda

There is no clear cut agenda for topics to be worked on, as the team believes in the natural synergies that occur from a selection of top-level participants. There will be no scheduled talks or workshop: we expect these to emerge organically over time. The idea is to have a value-aligned cohort of creative and open-minded individuals live under the same roof for an extended period of time. Participants are encouraged to work on their own projects as well as to collaborate with one another, both at the conceptual, operational and artistic level. As the organizers, we will try to maximize the opportunities for serendipity and cross-pollination. There will be some room for group building activities towards the beginning, presentations to be held throughout the event, and an “Open House” Weekend open  to outsiders to visit the facilities and view our progress.

Visitors / VIPs

Some established artists, musicians, top level developers and guests from the external world, including traditional metaverse industries, will be invited to visit the event in the hope that they can contribute with their own experiences and help building a bridge between the still seclusive Web3 and Traditional Worlds.

Location and Reasoning

The Chateau du Fey has served as the home to the Feytopia community for 3 years, and has hosted many events geared towards Web3, blockchain technology, digital art, and future-proof environmental thinking. By harnessing the network of the place, Chateau du Fey has become a centrepoint for great thinkers oriented towards rebuilding the future in an open and collaborative way. The space and the facilities are perfectly oriented to explore potential use cases of Web3 and NFT in the context of the Metaverse.

How much funding are you requesting

4 ETH from Public Nouns. This is intended to be part of a co-funding round supported by several key organizations across the NFT / Metaverse ecosystem. The funding will be used for preparing the venue for the residency, hosting the guests, and paying for event related expenses. Our total budget for the event is $60,000. Budget breakdown available on request.

Why fund this?

In our experience having successfully organized residencies with similar formats in the past, events like this lead to immense amounts of collaboration, open source knowledge, and leaps forward in technical progress. Sponsors have a unique opportunity to be involved, fund positive-sum outcomes, and build a network with highly aligned builders and leaders in the space.

Website

Deck with additional information concerning the residency is available here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/11uDyyC_etEQ4DriBfTzHsSkPQZBnnWG4/view

What makes a good sponsor?

We value sponsors that contribute to the development of resilient, decentralized coordination tools in all ways. Some sponsors contribute technical tooling, research, and products. Some sponsors bring perspectives from academia, economics, politics, and institutions where they learned what works and what doesn’t. We are seeking participatory & cultural sponsors, beyond covering the event costs.

Success

We will measure the success of the project by the new lifelong friendships that will be established, the research outcomes, new initiatives and future collaborations between the residents, the NFT space, and the sponsors.

Previous outcomes

Beyond the several artistics collaborations that have emerged during GLITCH1 and GLITCH2, the projects listed below are a direct outcome of GLITCH 2021 and GLITCH 2022, which specifically focus on increasing public goods within the NFT and blockchain art spaces:

• DAO Palace (2022 and 2023): two 10 days research-focused residencies at the Bueckeburg Palace in Germany . About 30-40 participants attended to create, imagine, develop theories, and build projects and standards aimed at supporting a more open and collaborative DAO ecosystem.
• REMIX NFT to promote a culture of remix within the NFT space: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1EJ4ywCeEU6ZG0VODaDgK0SzWxjWgyYR8LwctfRpti4I/edit
• IMPACT NFT: https://pdefilippi.com/impact/, using NFT to promote climate positive solutions, in collaboration with Tomas Saraceno
• Eco-coin: a 2 weeks gathering in Wilbur, California, to design standards and protocols to reward ecologically-friendly activities through voluntary markets for impact certificates
• Token-bound License, to embed legal licenses directly into the tokens: https://james.grimmelmann.net/files/articles/token-bound-nft-license.pdf
• Feral File exhibition (ecotone): https://objkt.com/collection/feralfile-20-ecotone, promoting collaboration between artists and blockchain engineers.
• GLITCH 2.5: art residency in Portugal to support the creation of a festival for NFT artists and builders / makers.
• Bio-glitch: https://glitch.bio/ - a collective interested in exploring the use of blockchain and web3 for supporting the environment.

Team description

Isaac Patka is the co-creator of Logos, a DAO exchange furthering the adoption of Web3 governance in IRL communities. He is also a core developer in the Moloch Mystics building Moloch v3, a member of DAOHaus, and a research fellow with DAOstar, building interoperable standards for web3 communities. Primavera De Filippi is a Research Director at the National Center of Scientific Research in Paris, and Faculty Associate at the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard. She is the author of “Blockchain and the Law” published by Harvard University Press. Former member of the Global Future Council on Blockchain Technologies at the World Economic Forum, she is the founder and coordinator of the U.N. Internet Governance Forum’s dynamic coalitions on Blockchain Technology (COALA).  Ooli De Villèle is a web3 fashion designer interested in how DAOs can bridge the physical and the digital. Previous to this she was the founder and CEO of a tech startup, growing the company to over $100 million in three years on the market. Ooli holds a patent for a wireless mesh technology that she built while acquiring her MFA at University of California, San Diego. With this work, she held a dual research appointment at the California Institute of Telecommunications & InfoTechnologies and the Center for Development Finance in Chennai, India.

Proposal Feedback

This proposal was discussed in the Discord forum prior to posting, after canceling an earlier version to allow for time for discussion. Thoughtful points were brought up around whether it’s higher impact to fund events (which are excludable by necessity due to available space) or to fund non-excludable initiatives directly.

Glitch is different in many ways than e.g. a hackathon sponsorship or a conference booth. Most of the artists and builders at Glitch are working on initiatives that are short on time to collaborate, but don’t need significant funding. There have been many public goods outcomes in the past editions, such as the Token-Bound NFT License developed to facilitate the licensing of right via NFTs or the REMIX NFT Protocol, which embeds the values of remixes and Creative Commons into an NFT framework (all released under Open Source code). These didn’t require follow on funding – once the license is done, it’s published and complete – but it did require getting experts into the same place for two weeks to figure it out. Along these lines, open source initiatives that were not born at Glitch, but that were heavily worked on at Glitch, and benefited from the contributions of many of the participants there, e.g https://eden.art/ – they were able to produce cleaner code and better architecture than they would have been able to otherwise.

Glitch this year will have a specific emphasis on developing workshops around new tooling. The workshops will be open sourced (the attendees have a strong open source ethos), and they’ll be higher quality because they had a “trial run” at Glitch prior to publishing. Funding the event doesn’t directly fund the initiatives, but it does ensure that collaboration happens that makes the initiatives much stronger. This does have a sweet spot – one or two days is not enough, a few months is too long – and two weeks has been a good balance between ensuring that projects are improved collectively while making the best use of the funds.