report

Introduction

By Inte Gloerich

On the need to reimagine, reclaim, and restructure

Barely recovered from the depletion of cultural funding during the Great Recession of more than a decade ago and the more recent difficulties of staying afloat as the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded, arts and culture currently face dire circumstances yet again. A random sample of articles about arts and cultural funding in various European contexts written in the past year warns that “France slashes its culture budget,” the Finnish “cultural sector will face cuts of millions of euros,” and that “UK spending on culture [is] among the lowest in Europe.” With a flair for the theatrical, the German Culture Council announced that “the golden age for culture is over.” Walfisz, J. ‘As France slashes its culture budget (…),’ Euronews, 18 April 2024; ‘Finland: Severe cuts proposed to arts and culture funding,’ Finnish Institute Benelux, 13 August 2024; Harris, G. ‘UK Spending on culture among the lowest in Europe (…),’ The Art Newspaper, 23 July 2024; Dege, S. ‘Can Germany still pay for arts funding?’ Deutsche Welle, 12 July 2024.

These measures are paired with a widespread surge of (extreme) right-wing parties and repressive policies in many places around the world, including Europe. In Hungary, artistic expression is severely restricted as Prime Minister Orbán “wrest[s] control of the arts and cultural sector and refashion[s] it to serve the interests of [his] party’s agenda,” in Austria, the Freedom Party (FPÖ) “is threatening to cut funding for ‘woke’ culture,” and, in The Netherlands and many other places, any arts and culture not deemed “traditional” or “national” is increasingly at risk of losing funding. Moreover, in Germany, artists and cultural organisations showing solidarity with Palestinians during the ongoing genocide in Gaza and protesting the German state’s complicity in it face funding cuts, revoked decisions on prize money, and censorship. Open Letter. Resistance Now: Free Culture,’ European Theatre, 2024; Sethi, S., et al., Systematic Suppression: Hungary’s Arts & Culture in Crisis, Artistic Freedom Initiative, 2022; Shreidi, Z., ‘German Repression of Palestinian Culture and soidarity: Independence as Resistance,’ Reset! 8 October 2024.

This context informs the conversations with artists and creative practitioners in this book. Often, their work with and around Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) emerges from these very concerns. Does that mean that DAOs are capable of solving the sociopolitical issues of precarity, cuts, and censorship? No. ‘Free blockchain money’ does not exist. DAOs do not ‘magically’ make more funding appear, least of all structurally so. And DAOs do not allow artists and cultural practitioners to leave behind their national contexts of austerity and repression and exchange them for some virtual utopia.

However, this does not mean that engaging with DAOs is pointless in the face of these circumstances and limitations. In this publication, I ask practitioners to share their experiences, focussing specifically on the definition of new forms of agency in cultural decision-making, explorations of shared ownership in arts and culture amid widespread logics of private property and extractivism, and the making of prefigurative claims on futures envisioned from the bottom up. None of these practices will be able to replace the structures of state funding or cancel oppressive concentrations of power any time soon, but they do open up space to manoeuvre and create tactical interventions, to find each other and build solidarity, and to regain a sense of futurity together. In other words, to reimagine, reclaim, and restructure shared socio-technical futures.

The six people that I interviewed represent key voices in the countercultural and artistic DAO space. Penny Rafferty is a co-founder of Black Swan — a DAO that pursued horizontal and decentralised approaches to art-making — and she pushes DAO discourse into new directions with critical and imaginative work. Erik Bordeleau is a co-founder of The Sphere — a DAO that explores new ecologies of funding to develop a regenerative commons for the performing arts — and contributes boundary-pushing philosophical and media theoretical perspectives to DAO thought. Ruth Catlow developed CultureStake — a voting system for decentralised cultural decision-making that uses quadratic voting on the blockchain — and has been a central figure shaping and theorising the intersection between the artworld and DAOs. Yazan Khalili is a co-founder of Dayra — a DAO-based economic model to appreciate and share communal wealth in the absence of money — and a cultural activist who lays bare the depoliticising effects of the crisis economy and aims to reinvigorate trust-based practices. Aude Launay is a co-founder of Decentralised Autonomous Kunstverein — an early art DAO — and their philosophical work pulls the political and intellectual lineages at play in DAO culture into focus. Stacco Troncoso is a co-founder of DisCO — which is not a DAO, but rather a critique of and an alternative to them — and an outspoken proponent of anti-capitalist, decolonial, and intersectionally feminist approaches to work and technology.

Why DAOs?

Perhaps it would be expected that I use this introduction to explain in detail what DAOs actually are and how they work. Just like the blockchain technology they make use of, DAOs can be hard to understand, and despite a wealth of online resources going over their functionalities and use cases, this complexity seems to always remain present. Every explainer video or how-to article emphasises a different technological feature and presents different individual and social benefits — from speculative financial practices to community-based organisation. Moreover, blockchain and DAO technology constantly evolve and are used in the context of radically diverse worldviews. As a result, a scholarly glossary of blockchain-related terms writes that “there is neither a formal definition nor a common understanding” Valiente, M.C., and F. Tschorsch. ‘Blockchain-Based Technologies_,’ in Ferrari, V., F. et al. (eds), Log Out_. A Glossary of Technological Resistance and Decentralization_, Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2023. of what ‘blockchain-based technologies’ refers to.

Nevertheless, a bit more detail is provided later in the same glossary, where a DAO is described as “a blockchain-based system that enables people to coordinate and govern themselves mediated by a set of self-executing rules deployed on a public blockchain, and whose governance is decentralised (i.e., independent from central control).” Hassan, S., and P. de Filippi. ‘DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization)_,’ in ibid, p. 109.

Now, this might seem very much like a definition, but its authors almost immediately point to the ambiguity inherent in it. They show that, fundamentally, each of the words that make up the name ‘DAO’ can be interpreted in multiple ways. For example, does decentralisation only refer to the way a DAO is infrastructurally set up, or does it also refer to the decentralisation of power? And if so, does this only refer to the effort to decentralise, or does it refer to actual outcomes? Does the autonomy of a DAO refer to its capacity to execute code without the intervention of humans — i.e., a technical kind of autonomy — or does it refer to the capacity of a group of people to self-determine their rules of engagement and governance models — i.e., a political kind of autonomy? And finally, what qualifies a DAO as organisational? Does the (automated) execution of algorithmic processes — which might be part of a company’s or community’s activities to facilitate their own organisation — qualify as organisational, or should people – and perhaps even a more-than-human community — continuously remain involved to qualify a DAO as organisational? Ibid. Additionally, for a more detailed discussion on the term decentralisation, see Bodó, B., J.K. Brekke, and J.H. Hoepman. ‘Decentralisation: A Multidisciplinary Perspective.’ Internet Policy Review 10.2, 2021, pp. 1–21, https://www.econstor.eu/handle/10419/235966.

All of these open questions mean that, in practice, technological structures that are referred to as DAOs may turn out to centralise power or to overrule engaged interpersonal negotiations and exchanges about how to live and organise together with others with predefined, self-executing algorithms. Let me be clear: any part of such an outcome is not what interests me about DAOs. It also means that building DAOs that have radically different sociopolitical and cultural implications requires difficult, continuous, and situated work.

It is undeniable that colonial, extractive, and speculative financial practices and the DAO space overlap in many places, I have detailed some of these overlaps, particularly their colonial and extractive dimensions, in previous work, such as Gloerich, I. Reimagining the Truth Machine: Blockchain Imaginaries between the Rational and the More-than-Rational, PhD diss., Utrecht University, 2025. yet it is also undeniable that people who have radically different concerns and interests — ones that could be described with adjectives like anti-capitalist, commons-based, decolonial, feminist and ecological — still engage with DAO technology. Instead of presenting a working definition for the remainder of this book — which will inevitably age badly — I have chosen instead to ask each person that I interviewed what they understand DAOs to be and why they find them interesting. What are their motivations to engage with the technology, and what is their understanding of the practices and social relations that the technology can facilitate, especially in the context of the funding cuts and repressive measures described above? You can find their answers at the start of and sprinkled throughout each interview.

Alternative economies responding to the needs of communities and prefiguring reimagined futures

As a preview, I have distilled three overarching themes that emerge from the interviews. First, the interviewees share a commitment to working towards a different — e.g., more inclusive, resilient, commons-based, or self-organised — economy for arts and culture. Frustrated with top-down funding decisions, widespread precarity, and ideological demands on arts and culture, interviewees express this commitment in terms of the rethinking the notions of value and wealth, See e.g., Yazan Khalili and Stacco Troncoso. the proposal of practical alternatives to grant-writing procedures and more inclusive art markets, See e.g., Erik Bordeleau and Aude Launay and the making of explicit socio-political demands with regards to anti-capitalist and decolonial relations and environmentally systainable systems. See e.g., Ruth Catlow and Stacco Troncoso. Ultimately, many participants see DAOs as a way to turn the economy from an abstract hyperobject that ‘regular people’ do not (feel they) have any agency over Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. into designable prototypes that people can experience, play-test, and tweak. While they are not able to undo the power of capitalism in the near future, artistic and activist experiments with DAOs and similar sociotechnical systems can reinvigorate an economic and political awareness that is necessary for people to start building alternatives to extractive and oppressive structures and power relations.

Second, the interviewees also share a commitment to responding to the needs of specific communities. They share an attitude that can be summarised through Penny Rafferty’s phrase “culture before structure.” See Penny Rafferty’s interview. Rather than departing from the technology and searching for a use case — examples of which abound in blockchain culture — the DAOs of the interviewees are used only to support communities with regards to the actual needs and concerns they encounter. Communities are actively involved in the process of defining the rules of engagement that make up a DAO and continue to contribute through proposals and voting throughout the lifetime of a DAO. In such community-based processes, setting up a DAO raises questions about how to live together with others and the values according to which to organise this relational space. As such, these DAOs are changeable entities that only persist through the continued involvement of engaged members. See Aude Launay’s interview about the efforts it takes to maintain a DAO. While DAOs are often thought of in terms of immutability — they log information onto a blockchain, which is virtually impossible to tamper with — the opposite also applies: people that organise together are able to mutate the DAO structure that supports them to suit their changing needs. Penny Rafferty discusses (im)mutability during her interview.

Finally, a commitment to imagining and building futures together with others traverses the interviews. Amid increasing precarity, frequent and violent political ruptures, and the growing tangibility of environmental collapse, the idea of ‘the future’ has, for many, turned from a promise into a threat. Komporozos-Athanasiou, Aris. Speculative Communities: Living With Uncertainty in a Financialized World, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2022. Turn to my interview with Yazan Khalili to read about the crisis economy that emerges in the context of these predicaments. Moreover, dominant narratives about the future present technologies as deterministic solutions that seem to exist outside of politics and, in the process, limit people’s ability to have a say in the kinds of futures they want to see. Many artistic-activist DAO experiments can be understood as an attempt to reclaim a capacity to imagine oneself in a future free from the limitations and predetermined frameworks that powerful societal actors offer. They are a way to self-organise the structures that allow one to experiment with and start to experience what different future sociotechnical constellations might feel like. Often, DAO experiments use Live Action Role Playing (LARP) https://nordiclarp.org/wiki/Main_Page. and other playful methods because, as Erik Bordeleau explains, “Play is absolutely fundamental” to engage people in developing future ecosystems and economies together. Working with DAOs can easily slip into becoming procedural or administrative, but building futures together — which many of the DAOs mentioned in this book attempt — should be energising and exciting! Besides the interview with Erik Bordeleau, LARPs and playfulness came up in my conversations with Penny Rafferty, Ruth Catlow, and Stacco Troncoso.

Risks: Complexity, tokenisation, and financialisation

Artistic-activist DAO experimentation also faces hurdles and limitations. For example, as mentioned above, blockchain technology is perceived as complex and difficult to grasp by many. This means that, even though there are low-tech forms of engagement with DAOs, many people might never find their way in. Not everyone has the skills necessary to untangle the technological logics at play in DAOs, limiting their insight into the technology’s potentially negative sociopolitical implications. Using DAO templates could be a way to engage people, but it is important to be cautious of lingering worldviews that inform preselected processes and structures defined by those that are more tech-savvy. Moreover, maintaining technological systems and updating them to do justice to future circumstances is a costly activity that represents another hurdle, especially in the context of depleted funds. See for more on these hurdles and limitations e.g., my interviews with Penny Rafferty, Ruth Catlow, and Aude Launay.

Additionally, interviewees warn that not everything in life can or should be captured by tokens and smart contracts as their inflexibility risks doing damage to the communities and cultures around them. Dive deeper into these issues by reading e.g. my interviews with Erik Bordeleau, Yazan Khalili, Stacco Troncoso. Neither should DAOs focus solely on those elements that can be represented in technological processes. Such inattention to the frictions, vibes, playfulness, and messiness that makes up community practices could just as well damage them through potentially ill-fitting algorithmic decisions that continue unfolding. As Ruth Catlow reminds us: “disagreements, tensions, or conflicts [are] just part of life!” See the interview with Ruth Catlow. and DAOs that care about the plurality of existence and fostering real engagement among their members would do right to celebrate those moments that cannot be structured and categorised. Moreover, it is important to note that blockchain-based data is particularly at risk of financialisation because of the wider context of speculation that characterises the blockchain space. Building DAOs that support alternative economies – anti-capitalist, commons-based… – also requires critical engagement with these forces.

Following threads: Glossary and syllabus

Besides interviews, this publication contains a glossary and syllabus, both of which are the result of contributions by the interviewees. I asked the interviewees to describe a term that they felt was relevant to (their) DAO work in the context of arts and culture or the themes that came up during their interview. The result consists of two socio-economic concepts, a description of a technical feature, a cultural phenomenon, and a creative practice, and provides a glimpse into the interdisciplinary space that artistic-activist DAO experimentation is. As such, the glossary should not be mistaken for a place to find information about fundamental concepts at play in DAOs or blockchain technology in general. For such information, I point anyone to various lemmas in Ferrari, V., F. Idelberger, A. Leiter, M. Mannan, M.C. Valiente, and B. Bodó (eds), Log Out_. A Glossary of Technological Resistance and Decentralization_, Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2023. I have listed the terms anonymously and in the order they were submitted to me, although a keen reader will likely be able to match terms to interviews.

Although not necessarily conventional for interviews, references have been added throughout the book to allow readers to follow interesting trains of thought and to learn more about the concepts and examples that are mentioned. To provide an overview and expansion of such resources, the book also includes a Syllabus, which was assembled by asking interviewees to share podcasts, articles, books, or videos that they thought would provide readers of this book with key entry-points to learn more about artworld DAOs. I added some of my own resources as well. The result is a diverse list that spans alternative economies, the artworld and its market, the intersections of activism and technology, DAOs technology, and blockchain criticism. It includes optimistic takes and very critical ones, speculative artistic work and practical discussions of systems of governance and social organisation. I hope this combination will inspire people to dive deeper into these materials and develop their own perspective.

Finally, the syllabus is not meant to convince anyone to enter the DAO space or to provide a how-to guide for doing so — whether this is useful or interesting is entirely up to each individual case and I can in fact think of many occasions in which it would be neither. Rather it is meant to be a messy but rich collection of resources that invite readers into the important and exciting space of artistic-activist reflection on, critique of, engagement with, and (re)imagination of these (and other) complex technologies. The same, I think, holds true for the interviews in the pages that follow. I hope you enjoy following the threads and connecting the dots throughout the rest of this book!