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 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.