Decentralised Autonomous Organisations With Others

The blockchain laboratory and debate series for reinventing the arts

The first DAOWO art and blockchain lab series in 2017 brought together artists, musicians, technologists, engineers, and theorists to join forces in the interrogation and production of new blockchain technologies. Our focus was to understand how blockchains might be used to enable a critical, sustainable and empowered culture, that transcends the emerging hazards and limitations of pure market speculation of cryptoeconomics. This series worked across a spectrum of themes and domains of expertise, breaking down silos and assumptions about what these technologies might mean. The aim… to birth a new set of experimental initiatives to reinvent the future of the arts.

The DAOWO Sessions: Artworld Prototypes 2021 are the DAOWO Global Initiative’s culmination forging a transnational network of arts and blockchain cooperation with leading international arts and technology institutions and communities in cities around the world.

Our ambition is to seed a new decentralised ecology of open source cultural organisations, built by artists embedded in distributed global communities. Designed to activate collaboration across communities, disciplines and sectors, DAOWO (Decentralised Autonomous Organisation With Others) events enable participants to interrogate the benefits and pitfalls of blockchain developments for arts, culture and wider society from local perspectives. Events connect visionary artists, cultural workers and blockchain entrepreneurs, together with local initiatives, communities, institutions and businesses to seek new transnational systems and approaches.

The DAOWO Global Initiative is a partnership between Goethe-Institut, Furtherfield@DECAL and Serpentine Galleries. It builds on the 2017-18 DAOWO art and blockchain lab series and 2019 DAOWO Summits UK introduced by the  State of the Arts: Blockchain’s Impact in 2019 and Beyond.

Download the DAOWO Resource #1 for key learnings, summaries of presentations, quotes, photographs, visualisations, stories and links to videos, audio recordings and much more from the first two DAOWO events in 2017.