Last week David Phelps joined the Ensemble community to chat about Web 3 and what it means for artists at the first session of the Ensemble Entry Course. Below is an excerpt from that discussion.

Host: When you’re looking at creative and artistic projects that are launching in Web 3, whether they be NFT projects or others, what are the ones that you personally gravitate towards, and what are the characteristics of projects that gain a lot of traction?

David: There are a few different factors. One is the fuck you value of the work. I think it’s pretty important. Many people here are in the space because this is very much a fuck you to traditional metrics of elite artwork. This is fundamentally a populist movement in a lot of ways. And even the way that art can be owned now, where you can have multiple people bidding to share ownership of a work, opens up financial opportunity for people to own artwork who never could have owned it before because the traditional barriers in our world were so expensive. And so anything that speaks to a kind of populist fuck you, can do really well. A jpeg of a rock is just as incredible and those sell for like a million dollars now. It’s this beautiful thing where it’s so self-aware. Of course, this is just some art that you can right-click save’. So any art that is self-conscious enough to own every single accusation that would be leveled against it, those tend to do well. The second would be anything that’s taking advantage of the technology itself and doing things on-chain that you couldn’t do off-chain, that becomes really valuable. So works that change over time depending on how long people are holding them, they change based on what else is in the wallet, they change depending on who you send it to and what their transactions have been, that takes on characteristics depending on what your own history is. All of those are totally new applications of data to artwork that never could have been possible off-chain. That’s gonna be valuable because it’s really taking advantage of new mediums. It’s the same thing as the switch from theatre to film, the first films all are just shot as if you’re watching theatre. But the value quickly switches into what you could do with film that you couldn’t do with theatre, and that’s the power of a close-up. What you want to look for is what is the equivalent of the power of a close-up with NFTs. And the third piece is community. It’s really about what the NFT is allowing you to participate in and be part of. That’s where the roadmap starts to matter a lot. There’s a lot of NFT collectors who are really angry about this and unhappy, saying the art should speak for itself and you shouldn’t have to worry about what the future of the project is and how the artist is going to be filling that out. But the roadmap does matter, and it matters because community is so important and people want to contribute and they want to be part of a project and you can’t do that if it’s at a dead end. And so things that will continue to evolve and grow out are going to be really valuable. So anyone who’s building the future Disney, and Bored Ape Yacht Club is kind of doing that, where it’s going to be able to take on a lot of other worlds, that’s going to be very valuable. Anything that’s going to create user-generated communities where this is really a seed for a project to grow, I think that’s always a good way to think about it. Like this is not the tree that you’re buying, this is a seed for the tree. And what you want to be thinking about is how that seed is enabling that tree. Is that tree community? Is it future projects? Is it things that users can create out of this? That’s fundamentally what you’re purchasing.

Host: There seems to be a shift away from a detached audience and towards a more engaged community. Has the strategy to build up an initial following changed in any way?

David: It’s really about incentivizing creation rather than consumption. So much of the shift that we’re seeing everywhere is that people want to be able to create, and the easiest way to do that is by building off each other’s work. The best example of this is Twitter or TikTok. Twitter allows you to create your own tweets as a response to someone else’s tweet. TikTok allows you to create your own video in response to someone else’s video. That dialogue allows people to build and build on top of one another like legos. And that’s fundamentally what smart contracts do for developers. They give open-source code that someone else can then build on top of and so everyone can start creating their own versions of it. To me, it’s not so different from evolution where you have these species that offshoot other species, and there’s always this mistake in evolution of thinking that the next one is better than the previous one and that’s never true. They create biodiversity where the previous one is just as good as the new one and they both survive and they might even support each other and succeed in creating a more diverse ecosystem as well. And that’s what I think we’re enabling on a smart contract level for developers, but also artists should be thinking about this. In what ways are they putting out a project that their fans can then create another version of. So fan art becomes so important. It’s about how you give people the tools to create their own version.

Host: If you were starting out today, trying to succeed as a creative or artist online what tools would you use to make that happen?

David: Web 2 will have a great next couple of years. It’s still dominant, it’s still in the mainstream but what’s exciting about this is- like mainstream artists can still have scale from people who don’t care that much about their work. If their audience is just willing to consume it but they can reach millions and millions of people then they’re fine. So if you’re in the middle of the bell curve you’re good. But if you’re on the extreme ends of the bell curve you may not have that many fans because you’re doing something that’s more experimental. But those fans might be so much more passionate about you, you might be a central point in their lives in this way that’s really meaningful. Those are the groups that have never been properly monetized in Web 1 or Web 2. It’s the ones that have this really powerful fan base that would actually pay tons of money for them even though it’s small, and those have been the ones that haven’t been able to break through. So I think that’s where we want to look in terms of what are the technologies that aren’t TikTok or Twitter that allow you to reach a much smaller fan base that’s much more committed, but I don’t think those have really been built yet.

More info on the entry course / speaking sessions at www.ensmbl.xyz.