Funding Proposal for the Pilot Project of a new Interdisciplinary Incubator Program “TxArt”
Introduction – The raison d’etre or why-this-project:
As an artist (music, painting, photography) who made a career switch and founded the GraviDAO digital builder collective, one of my key fascinations has been the different approach between the two fields of art and technology.
Developers focus on functional problem-solving, applying logical thinking and mathematical precision to efficiently solve problems. This approach extends to business, which addresses resource allocation and profit-sharing.
Artists, on the other hand, do not primarily solve functional problems but explore human experiences and communicate their findings through storytelling. They work story-first, with problem-solving in service of their exploration.
Artists and Developers, and their mutual products of work, stand in continual engagement. Artists have always experimented with new technologies, from revolutions in metallurgy and color-creation to software and compute-power, and likewise developers have been inspired by the arts to create new products, processes and applications empowering the people at large.
However, for these mutual engagements to continue and prosper, bridges need to exist between these two fields of work. Today, when taking a closer look at web3 as a people-first movement, we are sorely lacking these bridges. Art Institutions do not offer classes on web3 and in the rare cases they do, their area of focus is limited to the technology of digital markets and provenance. Similarly, web3 protocols and projects frequently employ the products of art as a business product, either in a tech showcase or as a funding strategy, but the art product exists in function of their business goals, not as a means in and of itself.
Looking at protocols such as Nouns DAO, we can perhaps start to see new possibilities, but nevertheless it is clear to the keen observer that web3 and art have a long exploration to go. What does a post-web3 art world look like? How can this technology serve the artists’ story telling? How can the arts inform the technology sector on where to grow? How can they, together, craft new modes of expressions around our shared narratives?
These are just some of the questions we need to ask ourselves, and if one thing is clear, it is that no one individual can hold the answers. Rather, it is by creating the soil which allows these fields to come together and blossom, that we will find the answers we are looking for: through a stochastic process of emergent behaviour.
It’s in light of these questions, and my belief that Archway has the potential to be such a fertile ground, that I would like to make a funding proposal for a pilot-project: The Geccoverse.
If this pilot project succeeds, which I believe it can, it will prove that an incubator program exploring the intersection between art and technology from a story-first paradigm is a viable strategy, and in addition it will provide important learnings from which we can distill effective practices to form bridges between these two modes of thinking.
The Pilot’s Objective - A fun experience for fans of the gec:
We want to build a gecco-themed metaverse with a tamagoshi-style game element and a DAO-like crowdfunding mechanism for the fans of the 100gecs band, and just gecco fans in general who are looking for a digital community. The geccoverse is the brainchild of digital creator Lot Ijzerlijm, and the first animated prototype she made can be viewed here: https://youtu.be/r–W1SDadnc
Joining us will be Lars, a young game designer, and Lumi from the Architec team already building on Archway.
Lot – www.ijzerlijm.com
Lars – https://larspeetermans.wixsite.com/portfolio
Ilo – https://www.linkedin.com/in/ilo-meeze/ https://gravidao.io
Lumi – https://www.instagram.com/luminary.phi/ https://architech.zone/
More about the band 100 gecs: https://www.100gecs.com/
A key element will be working with the online community of gec fans and crafting their shared narrative into a viable metaverse experience that is fun to engage with. To do this, we would abstract away technical hurdles and focus on fast onboarding.
Second, we want to leverage the DAODAO tech that Architect has on the roadmap to create a crowdfunding mechanism for metaverse players to fund new development with.
Third, we want to host the game as much as possible on the distributed cloud and remove all middleman positions, possible in conjunction with Github, IPFS and solutions like Akash.
Finally, overarching this pilot project is the TxArt program itself, where we want to distill best practices and use it to inform and run an incubator program.
We are preparing a formal proposal with a problem statement, a section on the team, a roadmap, a work estimate, KPIs to track, a list of stakeholders and how we serve them, our values, the big picture, etc. However, we would already like to kickstart the conversation and see if the Archway community has any interest in funding this kind of project and if there is room for a long-term partnership for the TxArt program itself. Critically, we hope to establish a relation with the CS DAO members and receive review from them, in addition to any requirements from their end to making this a success story.
Thank you,
Ilo
