# Continuous Museum DAO By [Skylight](https://paragraph.com/@skylight) · 2021-12-12 --- **The future museum will not be limited to the four walls of an institution but will exist throughout the city and in virtual space. The concept of a museum visitor will transform, as visitors act as learners, participants, and unintended actors that co-interpret histories in a decentralized museum. The institution dissolves as a solid structure to one that is porous, permeating liminal spaces. We can break the architecture of the museum by embracing a more fluid treatment of its objects. The Continuous Museum encourages citizens to become active collaborators in defining the new cultural codes of the museum.** Historically, the museum is a centralized steward of culture and history, providing interpretation, understanding, education, entertainment, and possibly, social cohesion. Museums validate that certain objects are important to a culture and heritage, and decide how these objects will be displayed and used. Cultural institutions need to relinquish some of its control over the process of design and interpretation, allowing for wider support of projects. If anyone can take part in the creation of the museum, the museum will tell a diverse set of resonant stories compared to the often singular narrative told through museum collections. The museum audience can become the creator of the museum, unlocking a deeper sense of belonging to a long-standing cultural institution. Is it possible to take a participatory design approach by fostering a more democratic model of the museum? Can we allow many voices to be embedded in works of art, so that citizens become active creators, exhibitors, and interpreters in a delicious co-creation of the museum? Luckily, the blockchain, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) allow for the disruption of the museum. Blockchain technology creates distributed systems that allow for new ways of governance and coordination without the need to trust a mediating third-party (e.g., a bank). One such system is DAOs, which implement decision-making systems that make it possible for online communities to reach agreements. DAOs use the blockchain infrastructure to enable transparent decision processes, formalize rules, automate certain operations, and hopefully, decentralize power. When the DAO is created, the DAO’s rules are written in code and the code is what runs the operations of the community. Members can vote to change these rules by using decentralized governance mechanisms, so the decision-making process relies on the collective agreement of its members. In a DAO community, one can use the DAO’s voting process for proposals and organizing tasks. Most DAOs currently use hard-coded rules to automate away the inefficiencies around things like voting or decision-making, reducing the need for human inputs wherever they can. > “So, there are humans on the outside,” explains Schloss. “They’re kind of thinking about these decisions—but then there are these hard-coded rules in the middle of these organizations that help make and translate those decisions into actionable items without the need of a third-party intermediary.” Depending on its structure and rules, all DAOs are going to be different. Each DAO has its own purpose or idea for why the DAO should exist, and why people should pool money together to support its mission. Ultimately, the DAO is a digital commune, where people can work together to create new cultural institutions. > Schloss explains the collective DAO mindset: “We’ve had this thesis that the more people that get their eyes on stuff, the more conversations are shaped around it, the better results that you’ll end up having. It’s like really carving a masterpiece out of something that’s kind of an amorphous opportunity. \[But\] I wish there was like a method to the madness, but really it’s just madness. And through that madness, you come out with something beautiful.” Recently, many art collector DAOs have popped up. People form a community that allows them to co-own art (NFTs), by sharing the costs of what would otherwise be an insanely expensive asset. NFTs are a type of token stored on a blockchain that enables us to store assets such as artwork, and they can act as a certificate of authentication and ownership in the digital space. In addition to selling natively digital goods as NFTs, physical objects can be “tokenized” into digital NFTs. The idea behind tokenizing a physical object, such as a painting, is that you could then own/buy/sell/lend that NFT as a digital proxy for the physical object. [https://twitter.com/_jamiis/status/1375618299472527363?ref\_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1375618299472527363%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref\_url=https%3A%2F%2Fpleasr.mirror.xyz%2FD9wIadL-5EEkt17glTtar21m3RDqfgkhkr\_\_OEE2mOE](https://twitter.com/_jamiis/status/1375618299472527363?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1375618299472527363%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fpleasr.mirror.xyz%2FD9wIadL-5EEkt17glTtar21m3RDqfgkhkr__OEE2mOE) The Continuous Museum DAO goes even further than an art collector DAO by deciding what to do with the art. Maybe the DAO decides it would like to destroy a physical piece of art as a political act. Maybe the DAO decides to use the physical artifact how it was originally used. Maybe the DAO decides to exhibit the art in augmented reality, adding new meanings to the object. This DAO invites anyone to engage in the curation of the world’s most important cultural treasures. > “My analysis was that when something enters the museum we can say that it’s ‘dead’ in that its life as a functioning object is over. Yet museums are immortal places – within their depots are millions of items, hidden and frozen in time. By bringing its objects out from these dark depots, the museum will exist transparently and encourage dialogue, revealing new stories and – potentially – new knowledge.” - Aram Lee Let’s bring objects out into the open and collectively decide how we would like to showcase them. DAOs are the future and will fracture the organizational structures from governments and megacorps to the museum. DAOs allow for digital coordination to construct a museum that is community-driven, empowering the individual to contribute to the recording of their own cultural heritage. References [https://frameweb.com/article/the-museum-of-tomorrow-aram-lees-bespoke-trolleys-take-art-on-tour](https://frameweb.com/article/the-museum-of-tomorrow-aram-lees-bespoke-trolleys-take-art-on-tour) [https://jisajournal.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s13174-021-00139-6](https://jisajournal.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s13174-021-00139-6) [https://www.artnome.com/news/2021/7/28/why-museums-should-be-thinking-longer-term-about-nfts](https://www.artnome.com/news/2021/7/28/why-museums-should-be-thinking-longer-term-about-nfts) [https://www.artnome.com/news/2021/5/1/what-makes-a-museum-object-nft-valuable-beyond-the-scope-of-the-technology](https://www.artnome.com/news/2021/5/1/what-makes-a-museum-object-nft-valuable-beyond-the-scope-of-the-technology) [https://editorial.superrare.com/2021/11/18/the-rise-of-collector-daos-and-how-to-start-your-own/](https://editorial.superrare.com/2021/11/18/the-rise-of-collector-daos-and-how-to-start-your-own/) --- *Originally published on [Skylight](https://paragraph.com/@skylight/continuous-museum-dao)*