The Machine that Eats the Artworld for Lunch

Over the last five decades, the intensive commodification of art has been accompanied by the isolation and beggaring of artists on the ground in even the world’s wealthiest countries.

The Artworld DAO think tanks are 52-hour immersive events employing technical talk, political discussion and uncanny working methods to think with blockchain technologies to create pathways to collective art production, tools, capacities, resources, resistance and solidarity.

Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) are automated organisations that allow people to pool and track resources and form joint-ventures, without control from the centre; to enjoy the benefits (or otherwise) of shared activity in the future.

We think of DAOs as a way to automate and distribute the action called by art manifestos. They prompt a re-imagining of relations between artworld stakeholders and restructuring of art worlds.

At the same time artists contribute to the technical field by interrogating the ethical, philosophical, and affective limits of incentive-mechanisms applied globally to human values, behaviours and structures.

We believe that by engaging with these spaces collectively, we will strengthen and build quicker and better models for the future DAOs and hopefully make them a reality for all.

The Artworld DAO Think Tank is designed and hosted by Penny Rafferty and Ruth Catlow, DECAL@Furtherfield and Principal Investigator at the Blockchain Lab, R&D Platform, Serpentine Galleries.