DADA - Crypto Art Platform
= "founded in 2014 by Beatriz Ramos, Judy Mam, and Abraham Milano as a digital platform where people can communicate through art. DADA became a pioneer in the crypto art scene, launching its first NFT collection in 2017 and being the first to encode and automate royalties on-chain". [1]
Description
Tara Merk:
"DADA was founded in 2014 by Beatriz Ramos, Judy Mam, and Abraham Milano as a digital platform where people can communicate through art. DADA became a pioneer in the crypto art scene, launching its first NFT collection in 2017 and being the first to encode and automate royalties on-chain. The DADA platform includes simple drawing tools and a horizontally expanding interface through which thousands of people respond to each other’s drawings, creating a peer-produced commons of visual conversations. On the surface, enabling people to participate in visual conversations on a platform free from rules (beyond the boundaries encoded in the interface), advertisement, or subscription fees is the main service provided by DADA. However, behind and through the platform, DADA has built a vibrant and active community with the mission to radically separate art making from the art market, through a vision called the Invisible Economy (Ramos & Mam, 2021). The Invisible Economy is a vision that aims to create an environment in which art is solely produced through intrinsic motivation. This requires fundamentally redesigning the way that art is valued and artists are remunerated for their works. The Invisible Economy quite literally aims to make the economic and market based mechanisms and incentives invisible for individual artists and to instead redistribute collective value through a form of more generalised income that helps to sustain the practice of intrinsically motivated art creation. Considerations expressed throughout the Invisible Economy white paper, published in 2021, permeate DADA’s community deliberations and practices day to day.
DADA is currently transitioning from having formally been incorporated as a for-profit company in New York to becoming a DAO (called DADAO), through an Exit to Community (E2C) with the goal of transferring ownership and governance rights to the community (Merk & Mam, 2022; Mannan & Schneider, 2021). The main assets held by the project include the cryptocurrency from the sale of NFT collections, NFT works from DADA’s own collections, other NFT art, the drawing platform and countless untokenized drawings on it, as well as the smart contracts which were used to tokenize DADA’s first collections and are considered to have historic value in the wider crypto art community. The E2C transition requires ongoing deliberation as to how the DAO will be structured and make decisions in the future, and how to sustain the project financially without introducing extrinsic incentives to art-making and community participation."
(https://policyreview.info/articles/analysis/dao-ethnography-building-trust)
More information
Source
* Article: The unusual DAO: An ethnography of building trust in “trustless” spaces. By Tara Merk. Internet Policy Review, Volume 13, Issue 3. September 2024.
URL = https://policyreview.info/articles/analysis/dao-ethnography-building-trust
"Echoing Nissenbaum’s call to nourish trust online, an ethnographic case study of the blockchain art collective DADA exemplifies how DAOs may be designed differently to allow for trust to emerge. "