# About The Sphere

(Short version)

*The Sphere* is a research-creation project exploring and developing new ecologies of funding for the performing arts. Inspired by recent innovations in the field of blockchain and distributed ledger technologies, our goal is to redistribute the risks and opportunities of making art by facilitating the creative involvement of invested audiences at different stages of the artistic and curatorial process.

As a collaborative and emergent web 3.0 infrastructure, *The Sphere* is a call for experimentation that challenges the traditional frameworks of cultural production. We envisage a world in which audiences co-own the artworks they love together with the artists, technicians, cultural professionals, collectors and other stakeholders of a given project. We believe that this model of collective fractal ownership will allow for new types of production to grow in the near future.

All in all, *The Sphere* is about new ways of being creative together, fostering a spirit of speculative generosity by making the success of one performance a catalyst for the whole art community.


# The Sphere Manifesto

We, the Sphere shapers, come from the contemporary circus world. We are also radical theorists, mechanism designers, visual artists, artful asset managers, fugitive planners, and so much more. We are interested in new media and web 3.0 technologies, and are inspired by the trust-making, risk-taking, boundary-pushing practice of circus.

The Sphere is a digital commons; a cryptoeconomic interface; a process-oriented (an)archive for the live arts; a virtual staking machine; a portfolio of social obligations and anarchic shares; a research-creation hub about weirding art & financial flows. At the speculative end of the day, we just got tired of writing endless grants and working for peanuts. So we decided, alongside many, many other people, to re-write the inner code of capital, and to initiate new ecologies of funding for the arts. 

Our goal is to create a space with differential skin in the game, a space where the circulation and experience of value is felt differently. The performing arts make us feel in a particular way how we hold volatility together, how we collectively manage to engender patterns of speculative generosity even in the most precarious times. The circus community is indeed one bound by a corporeal economy: it is a floating, spinning, open air conspiracy that cultivates the capacity to direct the flows of life, in order for them to be reappraised as a new kind of abundance. This reappraisal allows risk to count as its own reward, as it is granted immediate value by the creative ensemble. So let it be clear: as much as we enjoy the eerie plasticity of financial abstractions, we don’t believe in armchair risk management. We embrace joyful indeterminacy and leverage it by all means possible. We reclaim, for ourselves and for everyone else, [the power of shared metastability.](https://youtu.be/8s9aHb0jRSA) 

In order to reshape the economic gamespace toward commons-oriented purposes, we need techno-social devices and infrastructures that operate at the protocol level, digital governance tooling allowing for coordination at scale. This is how the Sphere takes shape, by developing techniques to resist the usual flattening of values against the horizon of the merely economically viable, playfully adopting frontend approaches to navigate the positive unconscious — the financial backend — of social life. Our hope is that the Sphere ecosystem, powered by our carefully crafted web 3.0 Karmic Engine and animated by an ever growing number of artists & anarchivists, can contribute to undoing business as usual by making performance mutual again, thus bringing ourselves closer to the great ecological challenges awaiting us.

We believe in the discreet charm of the precariat, in the art of belonging-in-becoming, in the power of precursive trust to bring new worlds into being. The Sphere is the (im)material support of our dreams. **The Sphere is our digital soul in the making.**


# What Problem Are We Addressing?

A key starting point is a shared frustration with existing models for organizing artistic production. Circus artists’ creativity is often limited by inflexible infrastructures that suffer from systemic inertia, restrict artistic expression and waste resources. We feel the need to propose an alternative organizing system that distributes power differently between actors and incentivizes artistic inventiveness. New forms of art can thus arise and inefficient bureaucracy is avoided.

The other main starting point relates to contemporary circus as an artform and its current reception. As contemporary circus artists and innovators, we are part of a movement where interdisciplinary, global and experimental work are essential parts of the practice. Nevertheless, the expanded notion of what contemporary circus could be is often held back. *We have an urge to experiment with the art production framework itself*. This is what brings us to imagine business models meeting artful propositions, pondering in tandem on their joint landing point.

We had no idea where this exploration process would end up at first. We approached the blockchain space as a new circus discipline – mapping different possible approaches, techniques and entry points to somehow interact with this hard-to-grasp apparatus. As we started to choreograph different economic flows and build an understanding of how the circus ecosystem could benefit from our design, we didn’t fully grasp the full potentiality of the meeting between these two forms of expression. Little by little, new ideas and possibilities started to unfold. What we finally had in front of us was something that potentially could change the way we engage with our artworks, how we share and contribute to each other's concepts and ideas. What if other curatorial models could be invented? Could audiences of dreamers and interested publics be invited to participate in the propositional stage of an art project? And could they all benefit from the new radiance of a circus culture that is actively involved in its own reinvention?

Circus is the art of presenting the vision. The art of doing. We have come to realize that the encounter with DAOs also invites us to fully grasp the art of organizing and accounting otherwise. We do not shy away from working in the unknown, collaborating with technologists, researchers, economists, philosophers and other artists in our journey towards a new contemporary circus expression, where our work with or against gravity meets experimental economic and organizational choreographies.

*Enough complaining about the creative workers’ structural precarity! This is the age of monetary experimentation - the age of new squad wealth formation.*


# Artist's Journey

![Artist's Journey](/files/MgWJRiLCHH2PIyE8UJJq)


# Collector's Journey

![Collector's Journey](/files/0nrlvlqOMvgeojZJBpHt)


# General Overview

Collecting live art is a bit of a paradox. How can you collect something that only exists in the moment? How can you make it live forever? Beyond following performance artists’ social media accounts, there are only a few ways in which you can actually invest in Live Art. Until now.

Inspired by Primavera de Filippi’s [Plantoid](https://okhaos.com/plantoids/), a digital life-form that feeds on cryptocurrencies and reproduces autonomously, the Sphere’s Digital Soul works as an automated reservoir – a **digital common pool** – for capital accumulation and direct distribution to future artists.

When you invest in The Sphere's Digital Soul, you not only support the work of artists you love: you become part of the artwork itself. You become part of an expanding network of live art production that embeds its own capacity for sustainable self-growth. *You hold space for future performances to take place*. In a word: you get a piece of an emergent and groundbreaking – or rather, terraforming? – **Live Art Network Derivative** (LAND).

The Digital Soul distributes funding according to two distinct modes: **circus mode** and **curation mode**. Both modes of operations are radically innovative, commons-oriented and playful in their effects and possibilities. These two modes of collection and distribution of funding are facilitated by a hard-coded web 3.0 digital infrastructure, the ***Karmic Engine*** (more about it below).


# Circus Mode

The Circus mode is, simply put, a lottery mode. Each time a threshold of funding is reached in the Sphere’s common pool, it triggers a **randomized invitation** to a performer or a group of performers previously approved by the Sphere community to produce a new artwork entirely funded by The Sphere. In other words: any performing artist involved in The Sphere can all of a sudden receive a grant to create whatever work they want, just for participating in The Sphere.

This mode of functioning is predicated on the overall health and growth of The Sphere ecosystem. Indeed, every time an artwork in The Sphere ecosystem generates revenues or collects funding, a percentage is automatically directed to the Sphere’s common pool. The circus mode is thus fundamentally commons-oriented. It demonstrates the coherence and capacities of The Sphere as a self-sustaining mechanism of funding distribution, directly and tangibly making the success of one performance a catalyst for working opportunities for the entire community. Think of the Circus mode as the Sphere’s self-expressive performance metric - every artwork produced in this way stands as a **collective proof-of-celebration** of the liveliness of the whole ecosystem.


# Curation Mode

The Sphere ecosystem’s main objective is to support the production of **derivative live artworks**, that is: the mixing and remixing, or rather, the versioning and reversioning of previous works into new creative iterations. Every artwork displayed in the Sphere Metagallery is to be conceived of as a processual prompt for future iterations – we call them **seed performances.** As such, each artwork possesses its own web 3.0 contract address and can directly receive funding (more about the funding campaign below).

Basically, when you invest in one of the seed performances, you receive a proportional amount of shares in the form of KARMIC tokens. These ERC-1155 tokens are a type of NFT. They grant you governance capacities over the evolution of the seed performance into derivative iterations (mainly through allocation of funding). These NFTs are also evolutive, as they are designed to visually accompany the transformation of the seed performances into new artworks.

Think of these evolutive NFTs as temporal vehicles or karmic vessels for the digital afterlife of performances. Each collaboration that effectively leads to a derivative iteration will be duly recorded in the evolutive NFT’s metadata. This modification in the evolutive NFT metadata happens within the Karmic Engine. It will automatically transform the NFT’s appearance, thus expressing the new underlying composition of the artwork. The NFTs in the Sphere ecosystem are thus operating both as markers of provenance, and as a registry of every successive artful transmutation of each seed performance. As such, they represent an evolving fragment of the Sphere’s Live Art Network Derivative in formation.


# The Enrichment & Anarchiving Process

We had to start the digital soul’s artful karmic cycle of reviving & deriving live art somewhere. So here are the different phases of the current campaign and how they will be unfolding over the next few months. Each phase of the campaign is a living fragment in a wider social choreography of value. They function as independent modules that can be deployed in different ways in the future.

## Summoning Artists Phase 

In November 2021, we issued a call to circus artists to participate in a web 3.0 collective experiment. Our call reached out to [CircusNext](https://www.circusnext.eu/about/) laureates of the last 20 years (CircusNext is a European platform and support program for emerging authors and creators that gathers around 30 partners from 17 countries). Out of the 20+ applications, 6 circus companies were selected through quadratic voting involving the Sphere’s official partners to be part of the Sphere Metagallery inaugural opening.

## Enrichment Process

Next comes the *Enrichment Process*: a series of curated workshops with experts in the field of blockchain, cryptoeconomics, new media art and NFT-making to prepare the artworks for their future collective value journey. The idea here is that every work exhibited in the Metagallery can become an object of investment because of the web 3.0 address and evolutive NFT attached to it. For the artists, it is the occasion to get familiarized with the Sphere’s inner workings and start imagining how they will take part in this burgeoning ecosystem.

Among the different workshops that were offered, we find: Erik Bordeleau on the recursive and precursive powers of a digital soul; CurveLabs’ introduction to the Karmic Engine; Pedro Victor Brandao’s on cryptomedia; Lene Vollhardt on performative contracts and social choreographies of value; etc.

## Anarchiving Process

We are interested in reviving past works, but we are even more interested in how these works will evolve and generate their own derivative lineages over time. This is why the selected artists are invited to *anarchive* their already existing performances, that is: to transform them into an open-ended score for future iterations by other artists. Think of a time capsule addressed to future performers, enclosing different proposals and enabling constraints to be interpreted in unexpected ways.

This artful mechanism based on the versioning and reversioning previous works challenges value creation models based on restrictive proprietary ownership. Our wager is that by facilitating and encouraging the multiplication of interpretations, iterations and variations around original performances, we allow for new modes of collective self-organization and governance to spring forth. These new ways of coming together are emergent and non-linear. They are better attuned to the value creation processes that are already happening in our midst and to which our current economic system is mostly blind. In the end, they express the mutual indebtedness and collective stakeholding that compose our common wealth.


# The Metagallery

[The Sphere Metagallery](https://thesphere.as/metagallery) is the 3D portal that gives access to the digital representations of the live artworks. It has been created by Steven Bachedler 3D studio, in close collaboration with the artists.

The artworks exhibited in the Metagallery are not simply objects to be contemplated. They are NFT-augmented seed performances pointing toward an open-ended future, initial fragments to be taken up by other artists for transformative iterations. Everyone is invited to contribute to this collective adventure in the making – are you ready to get some differential skin in the game and interact with our specially crafted web 3.0 *Karmic Engine* to initiate a new cycle of creative collaboration?

As an audience, you can interact with the Sphere’s Digital Soul Offering in at least two ways.

First, you can directly invest in one of the six seed performances. For that, you will need to use a digital wallet and spend some crypto (we will be happy to assist you if you don’t have experience with this process, come join us on our [The Sphere Discord channel](https://discord.gg/nD8hBgPgD8)!) (see Karmic Engine section below for more details about what this will entail)

Just as in the circus mode described above, once a seed performance has reached a pre-fixed threshold of funding, it will automatically set a bounty for future artists to engage with it and allow them to make artistic proposals for new derivative iterations. For this initial karmic cycle campaign, we set the funding window to last until **mid-April 2022**. From then on and until the end of August 2022, there will be an **incubation phase** (see below) in which any artist interested in turning the bounty into a derivative live artwork will be invited to make a proposal to this effect. The incubation phase will last until the end of August (exact date to be determined), roughly coinciding with the **Second Megavote** (see below).


# The Megavote

The second way to engage with the Sphere Metagallery and Digital Soul Offering is through **The Sphere Megavote**. The Megavote is an exciting way to support the artists presenting in The Sphere Metagallery and already includes hundreds of circus aficionados coming from our extended network of European circus partners.

We have created the Megavote as a way to allow a maximum number of people to participate in the Sphere’s ecosystem and feel some sparkles of crypto-circassian joy, even those without a crypto-wallet. Indeed, together with Black Swan DAO, we’ve been developing a very neat Discord compatible quadratic voting app that will allow everyone to participate in this democratic funding allocation experiment. The app will allow everyone one to carefully evaluate the artistic proposals that will have been submitted to create derivative iterations. Lots of collective effervescence ahead!

Through a **quadratic voting** process happening during a 1 month time window following the opening of the Metagallery (ending at the end March 2022), the public is invited to select which one out of the six initial seed performances will be granted pre-budgeted funding from The Sphere.

The Sphere is offering **€10.000 to the winner of this initial Megavote**, in addition to whatever sum will have been funneled through the Karmic Engine. Moreover, The Sphere’s official partners are also offering residencies and will be hosting future international presentations of the laureate’s show. Quite a neat package already!

Immediately after this initial selection process, we will issue a new call to circus artists from all over Europe to produce 2 derivative artworks directly inspired by the Megavote laureate’s seed performance. This time frame corresponds to what we call the **Incubation Phase**. These proposals will also get €10.000 each on top of the funding coming from invested audiences engaging with the Karmic Engine. The second Megavote deciding over this second round of Sphere funding will happen sometime in August 2022.

Note: after the initial Megavote window is closed, all exhibited artworks in the Metagallery remain open for funding for 2 more weeks (until mid-April). Our hope is that a fair amount of participants in the Megavote will appreciate The Sphere enough to take a step into the web3 world. With our support of course! The Sphere team will facilitate all the active voters' onboarding to the web 3 infrastructure with workshops and support throughout April 2022.

BTW: anyone who has funded one or several of the artworks in The Metagallery or just invested directly in The Sphere Common Pool is considered an **invested audience**. As such, they are most welcome to participate in the Megavote. Just make sure to join our Discord!

![](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/cmXe2t7deXiLDkWN0s7MIQqGrw6-ssB0jOj5-Rz39TR1y9rFPNVduiobu9H4oughTboBU2TFt81ZzZfoY8yJ73KIYdfsU3xJgfonltKrTU1VEtwzfiadiNc0SNPIZhbplQyyY70P)


# The Incubation Phase

## ‘How we Vote is Not How we Party’:

Once the Megavote and the Karmic Engine funding time windows are closed, then the real fun begins. Each seed performance that made it past the funding threshold will emit a “bounty”, i.e a sum of money open for claims by artists through submitting artistic proposals for the creation of derivative artworks. Depending on the amount of money that will have been gathered by each seed, this could get pretty exciting.

We don’t yet know what a Digital Soul can do. One thing is for sure: this incubation phase will generate unexpected results. This is truly where the weirding of art & financial flows is set to take place. Consider the usual mode of funding in the arts. Normally, an indeterminate number of artists compete for a predetermined amount of money that is, at best, allocated through an anonymous jury of peers. Structurally, this means that every participating artist is pitted against one another, competing individually for a limited amount of resources. In such a system, the intelligence of the process is strangely siloed. There is, for obvious reasons, minimum communication between proponents; while the anonymous jury of peers’ rare panoptic vision provides an intangible yet consequent “advantage”. As appointed gatekeepers, they indeed benefit from a privileged insight on how the public art institution works, for better (they will know better what to write in their next proposal), and for worst (knowing how to write a successful grant proposal isn’t exactly making anyone a better artist).

We can do better.

The incubation phase initiated by the Sphere will be facilitated by dedicated channels on the Sphere Discord. It will allow the Sphere participants to practically and radically question the traditional modes of funding **by facilitating collaborative dynamics between the proposing artists** themselves; and also by potentially including other agents in the collective creative and deliberative process – here come the anarchivists formerly known as audience.

Another element that immediately comes to mind is the role that seed performers will play in the shaping of the derivative work lineage. How much power and influence do the initial seed performers will hold over future iterations inspired by their work? To be clear: the allocation of bounties is ultimately governed by the **invested audience**, not by the artists themselves. Yet, through the anarchival process and the **performative contract** attached to their work, artists can certainly condition the type of derivative work that can be produced in the wake of their seed performance, by inserting all sorts of prompts, semi-juridical clauses and other enabling constraints. What type of match-making between future artists and seed performers will take place during the incubation phase? And what qualitative role the invested audience now turned anarchivists might play in this process?

What is most valuable is also what is most vulnerable. This applies all the more so to the Sphere’s Live Art Network Derivative in the making. Its value, in the last instance, does not reside so much in the techno-promises of our web 3.0 digital infrastructure, or in the alleged impartiality of our formal voting mechanism, as in the **effective games of collaboration** that this whole emergent ecosystem is about to set in motion. If our main objective is indeed to redistribute the risks and opportunities of making art, this will only be possible if we create the propitious conditions for an ethos of **speculative generosity** to flourish and irrigate this emergent – and always fragile – ecology of artful funding practices.

For it is a hell of a way to run a code: to program that which will otherwise wither, to generate collective lived abstractions and loop them back into existence, to seed the memory of past endeavours into propositional fragments and the preliminary instructions for running them, all the while curating a metastable portfolio of social obligations and anarchic shares so as to making ourselves mutually – and joyfully – indebted.

*"Feeling interdependence does not derive from knowledge. It is above all an act of “letting oneself be touched” and involves a form of gratitude that is neither subjective nor objective, since its truth lies in its generativity. If this feeling needs to be cultivated, it is because it is vulnerable. As humans, we know only too well that we may get dragged into ingratitude, entrenching ourselves against the feeling that we are who we are thanks to others. However derisory, interstitial, and fragile interdependence may seem, the task of the inquirer is to make it exist as part of a practical and political imagination, to be reactivated bit by bit and step by step."* – Isabelle Stengers, [We are divided](https://www.e-flux.com/journal/114/366189/we-are-divided/))


# The Karmic Engine

Functional Description

## Under The Hood: **The web 3.0 Karmic Engine**

The Karmic Engine is the Web3 core of the Sphere ecosystem. Designed by the CurveLabs crew, its main functions consist in the governance and automated allocation of funding. It also facilitates the *summoning* of incoming artists & creative proposals once a funding threshold is met. Think of The Karmic Engine as both the blockchained gatekeeper of the Sphere’s Digital Soul, and the digital vehicle securing the afterlife of performances and carrying them through their transformative value journey.

To activate The Karmic Engine’s entry portal, you need to plug in with a digital wallet (and some ETH). This will allow you to participate in the **game of collaborative funding**, leading to the creative deployment of one or many seed performances displayed in the Metagallery. This funding process takes place on [Mirror](https://mirror.xyz/digitalsoul.eth), a Web3 publishing platform that allows for the integration of different crypto-mechanisms for collection and redistribution of funding. Each seed performance will thus be displayed in the Metagallery, and also be represented by a Mirror article that functions as an informative hash of the artwork that also directly integrates crypto-crowdfunding capacities.

Embedded in each seed performance article, you will find a specially crafted NFT. This evolutive NFT will register the derivative iterations of the seed performance, and will also visually transform in the process. The NFT works as a marker of provenance: a living memory device that also potentially allows for the distribution of royalties to previous artists (and eventually also to early supporters). The evolutive NFT functions as a tangible testimony of the transformation of the artwork as it undergoes creative collaborations with new generations of artists. 

Therefore: when you invest in one of the seed performances through the Mirror article, you get an amount of ERC-20 tokens proportional to the donation being made. These tokens can, at a later stage, be converted into ERC-1155 KARMIC tokens. This conversion happens on the Karmic Engine Dapp. The KARMIC tokens are NFTs in their own right. They are unique governance tokens displaying a unique and evolutive visual representation. Each seed performance has its own unique NFT attached to it. 

The Mirror ERC-20 tokens function like a sort of receipt, or rather, a fully secured proof of participation. It’s only when they are converted into the ERC-1155 KARMIC token that they will grant you governance power and be turned into a visual NFT that will literally transform in your digital wallet. 

The funding campaign time window opens at the same time as the Metagallery launch (March 1st). It will end 2 weeks after the Megavote comes to an end, that is, Mid-April 2022. At the end of the funding campaign, the donors may find themselves in two situations: 

1. The seed that they funded **passed** the threshold. 
2. The seed that they funded **did not pass** the threshold. 

In situation 1), the funders will move to the Karmic Dapp – a specially designed Web3 application – where they can convert their initial ERC-20 token into ERC-1155 KARMIC tokens. This process is simple and straightforward – it’s really just a matter of a few clicks (and spending a bit on gas fees in the process). With these KARMIC tokens, funders will then be able to participate in the quadratic voting ritual governing the allocation of funding to different future proposals that will happen later in August 2022. 

In situation 2), the funders have two possibilities. They can simply exit the Karmic Engine’s process and get their funding back. Alternatively, they can generously direct their fund towards the Sphere’s common pool. This choice will also allow them to redeem their initial ERC-20 tokens for KARMIC tokens and become part of Sphere’s collective governance. 

All in all, the Karmic Engine opens the possibility for a wider range of actors to participate in a groundbreaking experiment in collective curation of the afterlife of a live performance and its transformation into derivative iterations.


# Offsetting Strategy

We are acutely aware of the numerous ecological concerns surrounding NFTs and blockchain technologies, in particular the Ethereum blockchain on which the Sphere Digital Soul is built. As of now, Ethereum is still using a proof-of-work consensus mechanism; we are hopeful that the transition toward proof-of-stake will happen in the near future. In the meantime, we are committed to put in place an offsetting mechanism that will rely on the amazing work done by regenerative finance initiatives like [Toucan Protocol](https://toucan.earth/) or [KlimaDAO](https://www.klimadao.finance). Through their protocols, we will buy tokenized carbon credits to cover our carbon footprint (and beyond). These tokens will be held by the Sphere Commons Pool treasury.


# FAQs

(coming soon)