report

Erik Bordeleau

Interviewed by Inte Gloerich on 24 October 2024

Dreaming is, after all, another form of planning

Erik Bordeleau is a philosopher, fugitive planner, curator, and media theorist. He is a researcher at NOVA University in Lisbon and an affiliated researcher at the Art, Business, and Culture Center of Stockholm School of Economics. He contributed to the Beeholders / BeeDAO project https://beedao.zku-berlin.org/. by the Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik in Berlin (presented at Documenta 15) as a web3 and speculative designer. In collaboration with Saloranta & DeVylder, he co-founded The Sphere, https://www.thesphere.as/. a web3 research-creation project that explores new ecologies of funding to develop a regenerative commons for the performing arts. In our conversation, we discussed how blockchain opened up money and accounting as spaces for creativity and imagination. With The Sphere, DAO technology becomes a way to bring together the audience and the creators into new choreographies of value, experimenting with the idea of digital self-collecting as live art. He emphasises how DAOs involve affective swirls or ‘vibes’ that cannot be fully expressed through governance tools like tokens and smart contracts. Finally, he shares his experiences with LARPs, which he thinks are a great way to reclaim the capacity to imagine the kind of futures we want.

“The most sacred art is the making of a treasury”

Inte Gloerich What a blockchain or a DAO is can be difficult to explain. How do you go about doing that. Do you use metaphors or examples?

Erik Bordeleau The blockchain and DAO space attracts commoners of different kinds, but also (and mostly) libertarians and hypercapitalists. All these people are interested in forming translocal, digital tribes that can be facilitated through the technology. It is an interesting coming together of different forces in the name of greater autonomy and the decentralisation of the power currently held in platform capitalism. In that sense, I like the expression “web3” because it conveys a self-organising intent. The story goes: web2 has been co-opted by platform capitalism, and web3 is an attempt at reclaiming part of the cypherpunk dream of the internet culture of the late 90s. Web3 conveys that autonomist vibe, and I guess that is always a good place from which to start.

Yet, I feel the expression ‘DAO’ focuses too much on the technological or infrastructural aspect of organising, especially so when it comes to art collectives. With the Sphere, our research-creation experiment to explore new ecologies of funding and build regenerative commons for the performing arts, we like to think in terms of a ‘digital soul.’ See Digital Soul-Searching: The Sphere Book, freely available on The Sphere’s Anarchiving Game Decentralised Application: https://anarchiving.thesphere.as/?fragment=37. A soul here is, among many things, an organisational principle. It harbours recursive powers, i.e. a certain kind of consistency through self-reflexivity, but also precursive powers, i.e. a certain sense of shared potentiality, of what becomes possible when we risk and speculate together. All in all, I like the definition suggested by Nathan Schneider, from the Platform coop movement: a DAO is “an operating system for the next generation of human institutions.” Schneider, Nathan. ‘Foreword: Practice Upwards,’ in R. Catlow and P. Rafferty (eds), Radical Friends: Decentralised Autonomous Organisations and the Arts, Liverpool: Torque Editions, 2022, p. 23.

IG With all these different ideologies being attracted to and acting within this space, how do you protect your own use of DAO technology from being pulled in directions that you do not agree with?

EB Early on, people used to talk about ‘the internet of value’ to describe blockchain. This is quite a literal description: blockchain indeed allows for new forms of value to be defined, exchanged, and circulated. Its invention opened up a whole new era for monetary experimentation. I do not think we can do much to prevent people we disagree with to make use of the technology. If anything, I wish the traditional left had more of an appetite for the infrastructuring of digital commons.

Concretely speaking, a DAO is a way to create an online treasury with maximum flexibility in terms of defining the rules of governance. In that vein, I like to think of DAOs as experiments in the art of building treasuries. A treasury is not a bank just yet; it is a smaller yet consequent pooling of resources. Last year, Catharine Cary, performance artist and The Sphere’s beloved venture philanthropist, sent me a picture from a castle somewhere in France. It said (in Latin): “The most sacred art is the making of a treasury.” That became a stepping stone of my intervention for the event I co-organised with Andrea Leiter from the Sovereign Nature Initiative http://sovereignnature.com/. called Treasuries for Planetary Survival, which took place in Amsterdam and you also contributed to. https://ias.uva.nl/content/events/2023/11/workshop-treasuries-for-planetary-survival.html. I love how conceiving of the making of a treasury as a somehow sacred activity brings about a new dignity to the necessary but often overlooked art of accounting.

Transforming the grant-writing game

EB These days, in Europe especially, we live under a ‘grant capitalism’ regime. Academics, artists, non-profit organisations, everyone writes grants! That is the way that we can access capital in Europe. Exploring the DAO space has made me more conscious of the actual conditions by which we engage with capital. Good old Marxist theory of value talks in general terms about capitalism, but it is too comfortable with the critical superiority it has established for itself (in academic circles, at least) and too vague about how to proceed otherwise. And so, early on in my engagement with the DAO space, and as a tongue-in-cheek way to highlight the peculiar challenge of dealing with treasuries, accounting, and money in a new way, I started to say that, after trying to save the common of communism (which is the title of a book I published in 2014), Bordeleau, Erik. Comment Sauver le Commun du Communisme? Montréal: Le Quartanier, 2024. perhaps we should start trying to save capital from capitalism!

IG In an article about The Sphere in Radical Friends, you wrote: “At the speculative end of the day, [The Sphere’s creators] just got tired of writing endless grants and working for peanuts. So they decided, alongside many, many other people, to re-write the inner code of capital, and to initiate new ecologies of funding for the arts.” “I AM A DIGITAL SOUL: The Sphere for Artworld DAOs,” in Ruth Catlow and Penny Rafferty (eds), Radical Friends: Decentralised Autonomous Organisations and the Arts, Liverpool: Torque Editions, 2022, pp. 291-92. Could you make this a little bit more concrete? How can DAOs contribute to the move beyond this grant-writing mill that we are all stuck in?

EB The whole blockchain experiment forces one to deal with the multi-faceted question of accounting, which carries a peculiar form of collective self-responsibility. There is this saying that “there are two things that are certain in life: you die, and you pay taxes.” One way to read it is to say that society is, at least in part, held together by accounting structures. What is so interesting about blockchain is that we can define new forms of accounting. This ‘accounting otherwise’ means that you value things differently and that you create the infrastructure for holding value differently.

With regard to grant writing per se, The Sphere was funded to explore new modes of funding for the arts through a grant from the European Union. It is kind of paradoxical, but it also shows that the State is looking for ways to renew its own mode of functioning. Strategically speaking, writing grants is a memetic, predatory game. To be successful, one needs to at least partly “see like a state,” as the anarchist anthropologist James C. Scott would put it. Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. You need to read the codes and the desires of the funding body you are addressing.

With The Sphere, we gradually started playing with the German idea of Staatskunst, which means art that is funded by the state and but can also refer to the art of statecraft. For us, the idea of Staatskunst became a rallying point to dare to change the rules of funding allocation as a whole. This rapidly translated into a question of ecosystem design. It might sound very utopian, but I believe it is the only way to go when it comes to “re-writing the code of capital.” You need to change the actual rules of the game in order to challenge the way capitalism flattens all types of value into the singular money form we know today.

IG The way you got funded by the EU to transform funding itself reminds me of something I heard recently, where a funder told their grant recipients: “We are empowering you to seek financial independence from us.” This phrasing is so perfectly neoliberal! In the context of repeated budget cuts, these funders are finding themselves in trouble as well, and they are keen to offload certain responsibilities, which reinforces individualising logics and widespread precarity in the cultural sector.

EB Absolutely. We got that grant because we read their dream of offloading responsibility very well, and we said, “Hey, we’re going to create a system that allows you to do just that.” Bureaucracies dream as well, as David Graeber puts it in The Utopia of Rules (laughs). Graeber, David. The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy, New York: Melville House, 2015.

Whatever may happen in the future in the crypto space, blockchain made people aware of what it takes to play the money game. To challenge finance, you need to propose new types of attractors for new collective behaviours. Oftentimes, DAOs just declare that they are going to be horizontal and transparent. But then what? People spend endless amounts of time on Discord channels or on Telegram, but if there is no clear sense of the type of future you are aiming for together, it quickly becomes very noisy and swampy.

Between designing incentives and accounting for vibes

IG There is a balancing act at stake here. On the one hand, you can design for certain uses, nudge people, and incentivise them to perform certain behaviours. On the other hand, you want to imagine futures together with a group of people and debate and iterate on these shared visions in detail. You can only do this well with a limited amount of people. This means that there is a tension between doing the hard work of imagining and creating shared commitment to particular visions of the future versus trying to code particular rules of engagement and incentives that attract certain behaviours so that a system can work on a bigger scale. If we want to achieve that sort of scale, what happens to the transformative imaginative power of working together, in close relationship with others, on these systems?

EB This is super relevant. In the beginning of The Sphere, we had a small group of people who strategised and imagined another funding ecology. We called this core team ‘the inner sphere.’ Creating and nurturing this kind of affinity is very important in a project like this. We then brought in the larger community of circus aficionados — The Sphere worked with circus artists specifically for its initial karmic funding cycle — and we created a quadratic voting system in which the community performs a process of collective curation. To keep things exciting and relevant for them, they were brought in at specific moments in the general process. I like to think of this post-capitalist participatory design as a kind of choreography of value.

There is a lot of wishful thinking when it comes to decentralisation and making things transparent with blockchain technology. I believe that governance for the sake of governance is a total dead end. It is not an appealing prospect for most people. At the beginning of the DAO craze, there was a lot of enthusiasm for the idea that we could govern ourselves differently, but as David Rudder, a famous singer from Trinidad, sings: “How we vote is not how we party!” This is fundamental because many DAOs pride themselves on the degree of participation and engagement of their members. But engagement and participation do not only boil down to voting. And this is why I am really proud of what we did with The Sphere. Working with artists, you get to appreciate what does not get formalised into code, into voting procedures, into all these things that make up official governance. You get to appreciate the conditions of collective emergence, shared metastability, the ‘vibe’ or sense of collective momentum that makes it all worth it. Vibes are not fully translatable into metrics of engagement, as we well know. And humans seem, to this day, very good at escaping these metrics. What I learned from building DAOs is that the line of flight really should come first. Accounting and formalised structures are necessary but always need to be kept to a certain functional minimum instead of becoming the main focus.

IG Can a DAO be designed to allow space for the things that cannot be captured in a token or a protocol?

EB Yes, I think DAOs can be designed for that. It is a matter of valorising processes rather than finished products. Above all, processes of co-learning need to be valorised. Co-learning happens in all kinds of ways. When you create favourable conditions for co-learning in a DAO, you already solve a large part of the issue of how to align people together.

And on a more zoomed-out level, blockchain reveals the whole question of funding in a new light. For instance, normally, you keep art and money separate. You get money to do something that expresses itself beyond money. With blockchain, it is as if we turn money into an expressive medium itself. This is a peculiar ad-venture, a peculiar wager, but it reveals what I like to call with Felix Guattari the ‘positive unconscious’ that people carry when it comes to funding, finance, and money. Fundamentally, money is a technology for coordination at scale. Experimenting with blockchain as a medium made me more aware of the way society is holding on to financial structures and protocols that we may not want anymore.

The Sphere DAO: new funding ecologies for live art

IG You already started talking a little bit about The Sphere, and maybe now is a good moment to describe it in a bit more detail.

EB Fundamentally, The Sphere is a research-creation project that addresses the problem of precarity in the arts within the late neoliberal context in which there is ever less funding for the arts while there are ever more artists. I like to describe what we are doing in terms of ‘the weirding of art and value flows,’ meaning that it is not just about getting more money for making more art but about redefining our relation to funding in itself. Funding as an art form, so to speak.

It has been quite a crazy adventure. We had the opportunity to work with an already existing network of circus artists, which is an immense privilege and fits particularly well with what web3 is about. In Silicon Valley’s platform capitalism model, there is this mantra: ‘Build it and they will come.’ It is a quote from the movie Field of Dreams from 1989, in which a farmer from Wisconsin, played by Kevin Costner, receives a vision in his dream to build a whole baseball field in the middle of nowhere. It is a perfect tale of how one needs to believe in one’s dreams… “Build it and they will come” works for platform capitalism because you need to spend time and money building an infrastructure capable of dealing with millions of people before there is even one customer at the gate. But things are quite different with web3. Things need to be able to scale, sure, but something else is at play as well. In the case of the circus artists, they did not necessarily need a DAO to organise themselves; they were already doing that. But what if we could augment the powers of this already existing collective? This is the spirit in which we approached the whole thing.

The circus world is a tight-knit network of people. Because of the type of risk the performance of circus acts involves, you need to be able to rely on one another. However, even though physical, existential risk is the bread and butter of these artists, the artists themselves do not talk about circus acts as risk-taking practices. Rather, they envisage it as a practice based on trust. I love to think of the slow weaving of these highly qualified relations of trust as an art of mutual encryption. Circus and the arts more generally, grow at the speed of trust. You cannot outsource that component to a trustless blockchain. What matters most is how to make sure trust-building practices are nurtured and sheltered.

By introducing blockchain and DAO technology to this space, a different type of risk-taking and speculating together was manifested. This combination of bodies and code is super interesting to me. This is where the weirding of art and value flows happen.

IG How does The Sphere support what these circus artists are doing or what they need?

EB The grant proposal we wrote promised that we would create a new platform that would protect intellectual property better through blockchain technology. The first question we had to deal with was what intellectual property is when it comes to circus or performing arts. With other arts, like music or literature, this is easier to pinpoint. But when it comes to gestures and choreographies, it becomes kind of tricky. Long story short, the terms of the problem changed fundamentally when we started to try to solve the problem. We evolved to a point where, instead of protecting existing works, we aim to generate a nurturing ecosystem in which to facilitate the creation of derivative lineages, i.e. versions of works related to one another. We wanted to protect — and, to a certain extent, explicate — the entanglement of artworks with one another rather than protect one original artwork per se. We called the whole process the karmic funding cycle.

We were inspired by Primavera de Filippi, who created a blockchain artwork called Plantoid. The artwork collects Bitcoin donations, and when it reaches a certain funding threshold, it ‘automatically’ commissions another artist to make a new version of itself. We basically adapted this model for live performances. The general idea is that each time The Sphere’s common pool reaches 10.000 EUR, it triggers an open call to finance a new performance.

As part of the karmic funding cycle, we ended up incubating five performances in total (two seed performances and three derivatives). More than 500 people participated in the two rounds of quadratic voting to determine which performances would be selected as seed performances, and which versioning propositions would be financed with the money we collected during the karmic funding campaign. This whole funding cycle is moved by a spirit of self-organisation and powered by an ethos of speculative generosity. Ideally, this mode of production offers a way to reduce bureaucracy. Bureaucracy proliferates where trust is eliminated from the system. Less trust means more bureaucracy. And more bureaucracy means that there is less money for art. We do not pretend to replace the whole system of financing in the arts, but it is important to create alternatives and to live by their consequences.

From grant writing to writing love letters

IG I want to talk a bit more about the kinds of values that are central in The Sphere. For example, I noticed on The Sphere’s website that you are interested in the idea of co-ownership. How does The Sphere understand a value like co-ownership?

EB This gets to the point of how much you can change with a DAO or with a blockchain. When an artist creates a work, it is going to circulate within a circuit of established venues that have their established ways of organising. How much money goes to the artists and how much goes to the venues, this type of stuff. So, the question is, how much of that can be replaced or supplemented with our little off-the-cuff infrastructure? In the end, we decided to stay minimal, meaning that the ownership of the work itself (the intellectual property) remains entirely with the artist.

Instead, we put our energy into working on the ethical and (in)formal conditions of how works participate in an upcoming derivative lineage. How can an artist prepare their work for future iterations by other artists? This is the core question at the heart of what we call the anarchiving process. The source code of each performance was addressed through a protocol we called ‘love letters.’ A seed performer writes a publicly available love letter to unknown future artists, and future artists interested in creating a version of the seed work write a love letter back to the seed artist. The selection process involves the whole Sphere community. This playful and relatively minor tweak was most welcomed by the artists. The love letter is a way of transmitting an intent and a commitment. It offered an interesting medium through which to rethink the funding ecosystem as a whole. Instead of reading and writing dry grant applications, everyone involved in The Sphere’s community got to engage with these passionate expressions of interest. The current grant system is optimised for anonymity to facilitate the impartial distribution of funding. In the case of The Sphere, it is the opposite; it is extremely personalised! The Sphere’s model is not meant to replace the current anonymous jury of peers model; it is a complementary alternative that has the advantage of allowing a new kind of participation in the production, the curation, and eventually, the collecting process for the whole circus community. Indeed, our key question throughout the whole experiment was: what if we could collect live art?

The power of narratives and imagination

EB This system of writing and voting on love letters is one component of the system, but we also thought about how to approach the governance of The Sphere ecosystem as a whole. Central in this part of the research process was a workshop called We Draw a Magic Circle and Grow at the Speed of Trust. The Sphere. “We Draw a Magic Circle and Grow at the Speed of Trust — Executive Overview. Youtube video, 22 November 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yL9na7DYJU&list=PLAilkxyDehQwNNWvI9ujyaPIVCsXUBahx. This workshop was organised at a moment of great tension within the core group of The Sphere. Unfortunately, even though the whole project is phrased as a commons-oriented economy in becoming, some people could not help but approach the NFT craze as a way to generate ‘free money.’ But The Sphere is more about supporting a live art network than about owning a single piece of digital art. So, when The Sphere did not live up to the NFT promise, some people thought we had to adapt our proposition to the NFT market and go more commercial. Now, I am obviously not against bringing more money into the Sphere’s ecosystem; it is one of the initial objectives of the whole adventure. But to what extent should this be done at the expense of the invention of an alternative ecosystem and way of involving the community? The workshop addressed the issue of protecting the spirit of the project — the digital soul of The Sphere — amid these tensions. Instead of automated rules, there was a series of (difficult) discussions about where the project should go next. It was not easy to express and formalise what is actually at play in this whole ecosystem. We managed, but it was hard.

IG So, the power of the NFT craze narrative took hold even within your own ranks. The story was that with NFTs, we can all be money-making artists, which sounds a bit like a new rendition of the social media story of a decade ago that told us that everyone can be famous. Every time there is a new technology, it seems that we get caught up in these powerful narratives. How do you protect your community against the pull of these narratives, especially as the community starts to grow?

EB Social media has generated a new type of persona that we did not know before: the influencer. This is a new value proposition, a new way of making money on the internet. In the case of art and NFTs, the discourse for The Sphere has always been very clear: NFTs allow you to collect art differently. The pitch for the karmic funding cycle was about collecting live art, which otherwise is not collectable. With this ecosystem — which includes NFTs – it becomes possible to collect live art, not just a single performance, but generative lineages of performances that are artistically and financially entangled with one another.

I think that NFTs do allow for a new class of collectors to emerge. Substack works with subscriptions, which is a way to directly support an artist, writer, or thinker you like. In the case of The Sphere, one could say you need a collective to collect live art. The question is how you manifest the financial powers of that collective. This is where NFTs become interesting. It becomes a symbolic object that allows the community to manifest itself. It is a bit like chaos magick: you need a sigil, a token, something that catalyses and represents the power of a collective externally in the form of a financial sign. This is a narrative or choreographic challenge, something that can potentially trigger a virtuous circle. It is a way for the public to manifest its interest in a work, maybe even before it exists. Instead of buying a ticket to a festival to see a performance, an audience member could say, “I would like to see this artwork exist” and then invest ahead of time. This is a model that the Berlin Circus Festival, a core partner of the Sphere that has been with us since the very beginning, is currently developing. Maybe you do not really need blockchain for that in the end, but that is another question…

IG Well, now that you mention this… Is blockchain more of an imaginative tool that is perhaps better not taken too literally in practice, or is it a technical tool for the actual creation of new infrastructures?

EB The modern understanding of something that is said to be ‘imaginary’ is that it is not real. This is a very limited view, in my opinion. We can clearly see the power of narratives and imagination at work in the crypto and blockchain space. Imagination makes things come into being. Part of the DAO dreamscape is about imagining effective organisational powers that work translocally, as Ruth Catlow likes to describe it. Your question makes me think of what the financial theorist Martin Koning says about surplus value and profits: “Profits need to be imagined before they can be reaped.” Konings, Martijn. Capital and Time: For a New Critique of Liberal Reason, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018. I guess it is all about the degree of effectivity one grants to the idea of imagination…

IG This sounds like you are referring to Cornelius Castoriadis, who argues that the imagination has a radical capacity to create reality. Castoriadis, Cornelius. The Imaginary Institution of Society, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998. I agree, that is such an important point to make clear about the imagination. It is consequential and, therefore deserves serious attention!

Belonging-in-becoming with others

IG Earlier, you discussed the different sorts of stakeholders in the Sphere, including collectors, audience members, the artists themselves, etc. How do these different members of the community belong to each other? You sometimes use the notion of belonging-in-becoming, can you explain what you mean by this?

EB Wealth is a collective thing, and blockchain has triggered the imagination of new collective formations, digital tribes, etc. This is less about the greater social contract and more about intensifying the affinities between certain groups of people and supporting them financially.

I have always been interested in the question of community. I wrote a book on how to activate the transindividual, the relational and individuating powers at the core of the formation of commons. It is not enough to just claim the commons against capital. You need to choreograph, you need to set attractors, and you need to facilitate the emergence of all sorts of movements within that ensemble that you have generated. That is why I like the expression of belonging-in-becoming. It is a progressive proposition. It is not just about sharing the same provenance, the same identity, the same historical path. It is about setting a goal and feeling how we move together towards that aim.

It is interesting to see how some people on the left react to the possibility of creating new collective treasuries. Wealth is a tricky issue. There is a comfort in staying in a critical position with regard to existing games of wealth, preferring to criticise them from the outside rather than engaging in alternatives. I believe that we need to experiment with different forms and configurations. We cannot just stay on the critical shore. It makes a huge difference in the way that we conceive of value and communities.

The connections between LARPing and DAOs

IG You mentioned the idea of playfulness a few times. Play, playfulness, and practices like Live Action Role Play (LARPs) are recurring themes around DAOs. Why is this?

EB Play is absolutely fundamental for The Sphere. Playfulness has a generative power. Something happens in actual play that is not predefined by the rules of the game. Participating in a DAO needs to be fun. It needs to be enjoyable to come together to think about these new ecosystems. LARPing is a fundamental technique for ecosystem design. All participatory design, all ecosystem design, and all new choreographies of value need to be play-tested.

We curated two LARPs in The Sphere. One Volksbühne am Rosa Luxemburg Platz. “Armen Avanessian & Enemies #48: Goldman $nax.” YouTube video, 10 April 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JKXtMD6etQ. was about collective fractal ownership, orchestrated by the Goldman $nax collective using the Real Game Play methodology. I was part of their Art CUMmons LARP at Volksbühne in 2019 about the collective governance of the Berlin artworld as a whole. I was impressed by their methods and asked them to collaborate with The Sphere. They created a scenario called OpenParc about the fictitious reclaiming of the land in a suburb of Berlin where a Tesla factory has been built. It was wild! PlusX. ” PlusX with Goldman $nax hosted by Leak Ventures,” Cashmere Radio, 15 May 2021. https://cashmereradio.com/episode/plusx-with-goldman-nax-hosted-by-leak-ventures/.

The other one was called The Sphere 2033 — After the Datafication of the Flesh. It was set up as a performance at the ConTempo festival in Kaunas, Lithuania (August 2022). The LARP play-tested the hypothesis: what if The Sphere became very successful ten years from now? How do we make sure that the soul of performers does not get lost along the way? https://www.lenevollhardt.xyz/sphere/.

Another LARP I participated in as part of the whole DAO-mania was called The Communes. https://www.kw-berlin.de/en/hackathon-black-swan-the-communes/. It was organised by Black Swan DAO and took place in August 2021 at KunstWerke, an important art centre in Berlin. It was mind-blowing! It is weird what happens to humans when we start playing a role. In this LARP, I played the role of Spinoza de Medici, a techno-poetic-bro with a taste for art collecting.

Each LARP I have participated in so far has been a transformative experience. I strongly believe in LARPing as a social technology for collective transformation, and I am so grateful that, through all this experimentation with blockchain and DAOs, I also discovered the power of LARPing.

IG Can you tell me a bit more about the LARP that was about what would happen if the sphere was super successful?

EB It was initiated by Lene Vollhardt, who is a core member of The Sphere and involved a popular technique in psychotherapy called ‘family constellation.’ We worked with professional performers from Lithuania and made them reflect on what they would like to transform in the art ecosystem. Based on that, we came up with a series of roles that embodied different aspects of the art ecosystem. For example, I played Staatskunst, so basically, I had the role of the State. Another important role was called The Scar of Funding. It encapsulated the trauma that we carry as people who write grants and get rejected or who lack the money needed to do work. The artist who played The Scar of Funding refused to speak in the role. She was so dramatic… And then we had another role that was That Which Cures the Scar of Funding. Staatskunst ended up giving all the resources that it had to That Which Cures the Scar of Funding, went on an ayahuasca trip and came back as a curator (laughs).

Within and between all this playfulness, LARPing puts a lot of flesh onto ideals. It allows people to explore what it really means for a system to be fair and redistributive, and how people that would be part of this new ecosystem would engage with each other. Among other things, the LARP revealed the lack of coherence that had started to appear at the core of The Sphere team in relation to crypto’s ‘free’ money dream. And because it was revealed, we could start to address it. The LARP directly led to the governance workshop we discussed earlier, We Draw a Magic Circle and Grow at the Speed of Trust.

Dreaming and experiencing different realities

IG While it is, of course, amazing and important to be able to LARP and experience all these shared moments, many people are too precarious to engage in this reimagination in the first place. What kind of responsibility do DAOs have in this context? Is there a way to include people who are too precarious to initiate experiments for themselves, or are there ways to respond to their needs?

EB If we take a little bit more of a macro perspective, I do not think DAOs will solve the problem of funding in the arts. The only thing that could solve this problem is something like a Universal Basic Income. But under current conditions, I think LARPing is a very democratic way to creatively engage in the practice of redefining the rules of the social ‘games’ we are part and parcels of. In this sense, I would say LARPs and DAOs are collectivising techno-social technologies.

I do not think it is a question of having access to resources or not. Anthropologist Arjun Appadurai talks about how if you are a colonised subject, the first thing you are often, imperceptibly, deprived of is the meta-capacity to aspire. If you are rich and privileged, that expresses itself through a certain confidence in making claims about the future and the network of people to actualise them. Appadurai, Arjun. “The Capacity to Aspire: Culture and the Terms of Recognition.” in V. Rao and M. Walton (eds) Culture and Public Action, Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2004, pp. 59-84.

What is interesting about LARPs and DAOs is that they both allow you to synthetically create the conditions for a new type of claim unto the future. I believe this can be a decolonial act. Decoloniality is not just about redistributing already existing wealth. It is also about creating new capacities for claims on the future. People who are less privileged want to know how they could start playing the game of redefining the future. This also relates to your own article Towards DAOs of Difference, where you talk about DAOs along Sylvia Wynter’s decolonial theory and the notion of the plot and the plantation. Gloerich, Inte. “Towards Daos of Difference: Reading Blockchain Through the Decolonial Thought of Sylvia Wynter.” A Peer-Reviewed Journal About: Minor Tech 12.1 (2023): 162–76, https://aprja.net/article/download/140448/184384. I think this way of approaching how to nurture alternative spaces from which to question the current social conditions is fundamental.

IG For me, the writing of that article was very much related to a particular moment in my PhD. I had been focussing on very mainstream blockchain projects for over three years and had spent my time critiquing what happens there, such as the colonial logics that feature in many processes of tokenisation. After all of that, I had a difficult time finding any positivity at all in the blockchain space. Sylvia Wynter’s framing of the plot as this space of difference within overwhelming structures of extraction and exploitation gave me a tool to recognise where interesting things were still happening within all that negativity. And by understanding artistic DAO experiments through the notion of the plot and plot-work, See also de Vries, Patricia. Plot Work as an Artistic Praxis in Today’s Cityscapes: An Introduction to the Lectorate Art & Spatial Praxis / the City, Amsterdam: Gerrit Rietveld Academy, 2022 https://networkcultures.org/blog/publication/plot-work-as-an-artistic-praxis-in-todays-cityscapes/. they were freed from the immediate need to change the whole world. They could be small, temporary places where people can create an opening in the curtain of reality that is made by the dominant forces in society. In these DAO plots, people could (re)learn to understand the world differently, to relate to each other differently, and finally to imagine the future differently.

I wonder, what do you think is the purpose of experimentation with DAOs? At what scale or sphere should they attempt to have an impact?

EB If we take this qualitative intensity of plot-work as a refuge, as a protective space, then I think blockchain is essentially about federating or interconnecting these different localities. The idea of the translocal is at the heart of dreaming through blockchain because, fundamentally, blockchain is a network technology. So, how do we network these qualitatively charged localities?

There is a radical space for taking on new types of responsibilities collectively through DAOs. Beyond the fascination for the technology, I am much more interested nowadays in whatever it is that makes people recognise one another and want to work together. Historically, religions used to play a large role in this, but that has changed. With DAOs, we have a form that we can work with, but it is so important to talk about the ideals, the content, and the visions for the future that are shared among a community. The narratives around DAOs sometimes obfuscate that most of what organising is about cannot be coded or automated.

IG That is a really important point to make about DAOs! It is a lot of hard work that requires being together with others and discussing points of view together. It is not as automated as some people may think.

EB The part that people think is automated is the profit-making! They think that a DAO automates what everyone should be doing in order to make a profit.

IG And it is so difficult to activate people for a future vision. But what DAOs do is make such a future vision tangible in small ways. They make it possible to feel and experience how things could be different in a very practical, tangible way.

EB On this specific point, there is a passage from Isabelle Stengers that I keep using. It is about the fragile interstices where individual dreams meet one another. Maybe that could be a nice way to close our conversation. The question of dreaming intersects closely with what we said earlier about imagining: it is not outside of reality. On the contrary, it is a super pragmatic operation without which there cannot be actual (and virtual) belonging-in-becoming. Dreaming is, after all, another form of planning.

“Only dreamers can accept the modification of their dream. Only dreams and stories [fabulations], because they are the enjoyment of living values, can receive the interstices without the panic effect of people who believe themselves to be in danger of losing hold.” Stengers, Isabelle. Thinking with Whitehead: A Free and Wild Creation of Concepts, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014, pp. 516-17.