When I started my research almost a decade ago I wanted to study how the housing industry (my industry) was responding to the big demographic and social changes known as the ageing population.

I knew housing, I knew nothing about ageing. Suddenly it was everywhere in my life, in everything I read - research papers, but also fiction, news, algorithmically generated click bait, wrapped up in my own experience of leaving the elastic end of elder millennial youth.

This is frequency bias  - the sudden reveal of a previously invisible form once you first sense its edges. But my instinct when I began the research was that ageing was in fact largely invisible until forced to look it in the face. Although humans have given a lot of thought over the ages to questions of life and death, ageing is thinly theorised; existing as either economic policy problem or private personal experience.

We are lacking useful philosophies of old age.

Despite this lack, preparation for old age is a dominant practical driver throughout our lives whether we like it or not. Woven into the structures and patterns of working and family life. Knotted into our housing system, underpinning the idealised home-ownership pathway that is now wobbling and fracturing as more people rent for longer. Old age is a motivator and anchor for financial, family, social and geographical life decisions. A lifetime of building the buffers of a good old age. If I have a job, buy a house, save for retirement, have a family, nurture friendships, look after my health… I’ll be ok, right? Well yes, but maybe no.

In this passage a falsehood that the author unravels: That the first half of life is all possibility and agency, and that ageing ends the same way for everyone. That the second part of life no longer has surprises.

Preparing for an unknown future is the grip and release of control, embracing intention and chance, an act of both hope and fear. It requires us to, directly or subconsciously, imagine our own old age without guarantees: What we want, how we desire the texture of our daily lives, what we feel compelled to seize now and risk paying double later, what we are prepared to sacrifice now, and what we fear may happen to us beyond our control. Because regardless of the buffers built, the trajectory of old age, like life but amplified, is both hopeful and precarious.

Studying retirement housing

When you do a PhD the trick is to have a big topic, and then to find the smallest possible kernel to pin it down and contain it to 200 pages. And that is why my interests in housing and ageing found overlap in Victoria’s retirement villages.

Retirement housing has a big cultural footprint. Retirement villages are a vivid subject of human and social stories like the film that is tonight’s feature. Why is the retirement village so fascinating to writers and film-makers?

• Because it’s interior is somewhat secret, guarded by gated entry permitting only a certain guest-list, and we fill the unknown vessel with our own personal fantasy and phantoms?

• Because phrases like ‘God’s waiting room’ are an unnerving framing of human existence?

• Because we want to scratch the vivid vision presented - of smiles and group activities, maybe because we sense that this manicured image of retirement papers over other realities of old age, and because the distance between these brightened and shadowed perceptions is a disconcerting uncanny valley?

• Because we are holding our breath, worried that any minute the tissue paper hiding the creases of life is going to tear?

• Because with a jolt we experience our own judgements about the lives of old age, judgement of our future selves: that will be me / that will never be me.

Regardless of this ripe ground for imagination and story, retirement villages are a marginal housing choice in Australia, even as our local industry has worked hard to replicate the growth they saw in places like Florida.

It is a physical and social infrastructure that is a direct response to the identified ‘problems’ of old age. Retirement housing is a pathway to downsizing to low-maintenance ease, a curated community and buffer against loneliness, the efficient delivery of support. It is an urban form specifically developed to support a good old age.

I talked to and interviewed the folk who were building, operating, marketing, selling and designing retirement housing around Melbourne. This is an unexpectedly diverse industry, with small family-run businesses, big stock exchange listed property developers, and the not-for-profit sector. They are building different physical forms; single-storey units in the suburbs, luxury apartments in the city, mobile units in fringe suburban and regional areas. In this industry there are healthcare providers building housing, and housing providers getting involved in the delivery of care. And all of them are, through practical actions, shaping what is possible or expected of a ‘good old age’.

And, talking to the industry reps, it was often extremely uncertain exactly what they thought their product was, and exactly who they were selling it to.

There were conflicting images conjured up as they talked about their residents. Retirement villages are defined and marketed as “over-55s” but the average age of residents in Australia is over 80.

The third age and the shadow of the fourth age

As a society we define the collective social imaginaries of old age. These are the images, stories and beliefs that mould assumptions about what old age is, or what it should be. And they underpin the development of practices, products and policy.

We make imaginaries of the third age. This is a time of retirement, comfort, fulfilment. A continued independence. Ideas of ‘active ageing’, ‘successful ageing’, and ‘positive ageing’ are third age concepts and self-help book titles; concepts that put agency and responsibility into the hands of the empowered individual. The evolution of the definition of the ‘third age’ is tied to historically-bound narratives of the baby boomers as a uniquely wealthy and powerful cohort, and to governments’ retreat from care and promotion of market solutions instead.

While the third age is seen as the powerful continuation of independent life, the fourth age which follows it is the opposite. A time of dependence and frailty.

The problem is that these social imaginaries translate ambiguity and diversity into fixed, communicable, singular, simplified, one-dimensional caricatures of the third age, and opposing images of the fourth age. It tends to positive and negative extremes while ignoring the uneven experiences that are the reality.

Another problem: Expectations and veneration of personal agency transfer responsibility for the costs and choices of old age onto the empowered individual. So, what is successful ageing, what is positive ageing, and what is agency in the fourth age of dependence, when third age independence has been so firmly outlined as the singular image of a good old age? The status granted to this particular understanding of agency has consequences for how the needs and desires of the fourth age are realised in narratives, systems and care.

Another problem: The transition between independence and dependence is complex and unique, it can be gradual, layered, messy or very quick and shocking. Not a clear demarcation, nor the ‘smooth transition’ from one to the other – not the myth of the third ager incrementally adding more and more services to buffer their independence and somehow, through their own self-vigilance, dodge the dependency of the fourth age entirely.

Defying negative stereotypes about ageing is empowering. But a third age / fourth age binary is harmful as a philosophy of old age.

Philosophies of old age

Philosophy can tend to edit out the everyday things that matter, becoming fixed wisdom or untethered introspection, rather than a practical way of understanding the world we collectively and continuously shape.

The idea that ageing is a personal and individualised experience that is left unmentioned or detached from our real selves, is damaging. Old age and the meanings and experiences of ageing are shaped by material and social conditions; they are anything but purely personal. Positive ageing does not exist independently of the vectors of wealth, society, and housing. Housing - its design, form, ownership, geography - can help enable diverse choices in old age, or it can lead to unbearably narrow options.

In a practical philosophy of ageing, housing is brought tightly in as an essential infrastructure of care.

Before I started researching housing and ageing, I was certain that old age, especially for women, existed in a philosophical void. It was something that happened in private, hidden. But researching ageing reveals powerful and useful concepts about identity, need, choice, agency, care, human relations, economics, justice, loss, equity, self and society – as necessary in the study of housing as the study of old age. A philosophy of old age holds a mirror to questions of how we are in the world and how we interact and depend on each other.

Housing into ageing, and ageing into housing.

Back to precarity.

The logical response to fears of a precarious situation is the construction of a rigid anchor to secure against it. But security is a false aim in this world. Brief lives crinkle on connected axes outside of our control. What would it mean for philosophies of old age and infrastructures of care to accept fragility in life’s buffers? Challenging the life-long pursuit of an intergenerational chain of property accumulation. Daylighting practices of dependence in family and medical models. Centring care in urban forms, streets, public transit. Acknowledging that individualised security is the wrong method for safeguarding positive ageing. The wafer-thin boundary that protects (natural) fragility from (dangerous) precarity is not constructed of individual security but of social networks and interdependencies that hold us flexibly and adapt through change and crisis.

I sat on a deep stone ledge bounding the enormous terrace of the Norway National Museum, stretched out under midsummer cloud, feet dangling. Two seconds later security appeared in a black uniform with badges.

“One foot on the ground at all times” he said. I obeyed.

He smiled and continued: “Norway is a rich country, and they think ‘how can we achieve 100% employment?’ The answer is through imagination. Imagine if you lift both feet you turn into a levitating cat!”

He gestured up to the sky, at the possible aerial pathway of a levitating cat.

“Now we need a rule to prevent that; and now I have a job.”

Inside, the museum is also teeming with security. Not bored security on a stool in the corner, but proactive security with cop tools on their belts.

I notice the cops because in the show I am seeing the cops are everywhere on the walls; tiny figures embroidered in black thread.

Britta Marakatt-Labba is a Sámi textile artist and in what is probably her most famous work Garjját (The Crows) a flock of crows transforms into uniformed police descending on protesters. It was inspired by the activism of the 70s and 80s protesting Norwegian watercourse developments (which eventually went ahead), but its meaning and motif has been revived throughout the decades since, including in 2023 environmental demonstrations (against projects that will also go ahead).

The work is indigenous activism wrapped in traditional women’s work, things that the establishment art world ignored (and continues to diminish) for longer than is defensible. Now 72 years old, Marakatt-Labba finally ‘made it’ in a 2017 show, but she has been practicing all her life.

Marakatt-Labba uses embroidery to tell stories about the Sámi heritage and way of life and to campaign for environmental protections. Her works are delicate and irreverent, and the symbology of the illustrations instantly attracts me: cosmic and ordinary. Her 24-metre tapestry at the centre of the show is a story, or several stories, of Sámi life, put together in an overlapping sequence. In other words it is a history; Historja as the work is called. Impossible to comprehend as a single whole (yes like history), the small scale of the detail requires getting up close to each moment, seeing the threads, at which point the security guards briskly tell me to step away from the wall.

At the time, Oslo midsummer, I walked around the show kind of quickly, big-tiny embroidered vignettes of Sami life were appealing but I felt like I understood them easily. Yet a month later I’m here, Melbourne midwinter, thinking about the attributes of her art (art in general): material, place, having something to say.

When Marakatt-Labba says “go straight to the material and find your story there, your work of art” she is humbling artists everywhere with the reminder that neither their material nor their story are inventions imagined or sweated into existence but that art-making is the speaking/writing of a single-use language to momentarily connect the two. She is also shoving art-making into the action of craft: go straight to the material; do not attempt to speak your language untethered from an action, a daily process, cause and effect, a structural possibility, risk, and failure. Each piece has its “vuogas calbmái” (its aesthetically appealing usefulness), and each practice has its back-face-of-the-cloth, showing the physical and temporal pathway taken to reveal the story (that you didn’t invent) in the material (that you didn’t make).

Historja is 24m long and just 40cm high, impossible to take in as an image, requiring closeness to see each brief part while filtering out the whole. It doesn’t take quantum physics to know that this format is how life is experienced and how meaning is made — in place, one foot on the ground face-to-face; and that this format is a conception of flattened-out non-linear non-scalar time that connects small planetary and small human moments such that you don’t have to try so hard to elevate the ordinary into the universe or shout “fibonacci” and give yourself a migraine flipping between microscopic and cosmic lenses, but instead accept the overlap of every scale and every time separate, together, held in the one geologic place.

Do you remember how generative art’s very strange blip into investment-grade, overlapping with the (hopefully more prolonged) blip of self-releasing, brought a whimsical side-effect in the form of the Art-Blocks-artist’s Project Statement? An unedited musing on the potency of their RGB pixel lines and the mint function as a kind of reveal of the universe? Desperate to levitate.

There is another group of artists using the blockchain not simply as a storage medium / directory, or as a method of dissemination or as a random hash generator, but as the material itself and the place itself (ethereum as digital art city - social, cultural, networked), and despite the medium’s newness and technological invention they embed deep into a tangible and human place (one foot on the ground) by carefully exploring its back-face-of-the-cloth. How it’s made, for whom, and why that matters.

But there is (or was) also a certain criteria in the same cultural space that reveres blockchain artwork that is about its own token transaction or market activity. Artworks about themselves, a shrinking spiral of things to say, a tragedy. Like a poster for a missing cat.

Each thread in Historja represents a tactile everyday reflection of Sámi life in the arctic. Marakatt-Labba seems to butt away attempts at interpretation; she illustrates reindeer not because is it actually about cosmic time and the patterns connecting their hooves to the entire universe, but because “this is how life is”. 24 metres of images and stories because this is just how life is: Are we missing the point? For five decades of practice, each tiny stitch is moved by her single-minded focus on the conservation of Sami life and land. That’s why the show is called Moving the Needle: Something to say, said over and over in this specific language and frequency till a moment of breakthrough.

Nic Hamilton has been making distinctly vibrant digital art for many years. The qualities of his work - growth, decay, object, atmosphere, light - are captured in NUXUI, a 333-piece collection of strange (yet familiar) objects, mechanic and organic fragments, tactile materials - decorative talismans / liquifying circuitboards (more here). An interplay of spatial and flattened elements flickers through all Nic’s work. This includes layers of digital texture, scanlines and splitscreen, liquid noise, architectural structures and spaces, and frames /screens as intuitive 3D/2D viewport devices. Born digital, but anchored to the tangible world of urban and natural landscapes.

The objects that form Timeframe follow the same thread. They are a mechanic and organic weave. Look at them one way they are chiseled from the elements, tilt them in the light and they are synthetic material decaying into earth, always in a state of change.

John Glover moved to Tasmania in 1831 at age 64, named his new property after a local farm from his English Lake District childhood, and recorded the new place. He is considered the ‘father of Australian landscape painting’ because he captured something true about his adopted home, beyond the European Gaze. Most colonial painters applied European landscape painting conventions to the Australian scenery: idealised, picturesque, grandiose, sublime to the point of threatening. Either 1) amplifying the perceived harshness of the alien Australian environment, or 2) containing it in nostalgic familiarity. Painful homesickness and bravado in the painted messages passing at the ship speed (<100 days) between two islands opposite each other in every way.

Glover depicted the brightness of Australian sunlight on bushland and painted the local flora accurately. Many of his contemporaries were unable to resist doodling mature oak, birch, plane trees on their canvas, direct from their yearning memories of what a tree should be; shady, green, thick. Glover, on the other hand, noted the "remarkable peculiarity of the trees" in Australia which, "however numerous, rarely prevent your tracing through them the whole distant country".

You see this when driving today through ‘Glover Country’, the unremarkable yet breathtaking landscape in the north eastern quarter of Tasmania, where golden sunlight fans out across bleached grass from beneath these peculiar trees, passing through their stiffly warped dagger-shaped leaves that are olive in your hand and deep blue in the distance.

Like the old painter-settlers, the A.I. also finds it hard to resist its European Gaze. If you aren’t vigilant, the oak, birch, plane trees creep in, the gardens become more English Country, the frames and structural elements are sneakily colonised by Italianate details.

In Timeframes, Nic-Hamilton-decaying-objects and the Glover-Tasmanian-landscapes are brought together into artefacts that blend the everyday (old but un-precious and preservation-agnostic fragments of a past era) and the sublimely decorative (landscape paintings) in a web-native form. The pieces are held in a web viewer space, and have been reprocessed and ‘de-flattened’ through gentle interactivity and aesthetics intuitive to gaming assets. 2020’s brush-strokes are diffuse, normal, roughness and displacement maps, their own form of nostalgia. Applied to the frames and the painting in layers, the roughness and sheen is highlighted by light and rotation controlled by the viewer.

If these strange but familiar objects ever had a function it is as mementos. The output is not just a still image but a piece you engage with through inspection, moving the cursor and mouse to illuminate texture and edges, in a kind of digital touch.

Thinking about learning

At the intersection of art and education teachers resist telling students how to think and interpret, instead asking questions and building techniques for exploring those questions. The teacher is not the expert but can help guide students to find their next step, and herself learn from the dialogue. The curriculum doesn’t pretend to be comprehensive, piquing personal interest in an array of new directions, new questions.

But if question-posing is the way to teach generative art, what is it asking?

Does generative art have anything to say? Three thoughts:

1) Decorative art, challenging no one: Most generative art being published today is pretty and/or clever. Making a beautiful algorithm and printing the patterned outputs is the ‘perfect’ piece of art, without any rough edges, challenging no one. Responding safely and chastely to the human yearning for a tool with no blood on it.

2) Exposing systems, making the immaterial material: Gen art surfaces the truths and weirdness of the technological systems that create it. A generative algorithm is a container of rules, a language of instruction, a machine. While the most affecting paintings and sculptures make the material immaterial, transcend their medium, gen art materialises and gestures intentionally to the math that made it.

3) Rich fruits of a technical craft: Generative art is a craft; the practice of making things with material and technique, and connecting to the way people use things / why things matter to people. In doing so, stretching the space for art to grow in. Not the human yearning for a tool with no blood on it, but the dissembling and rebuilding of the tool to sharpen its edges, or modify the social scope of its bloody potentials.

Here, a fantasy curriculum conceived for true beginners with no code or art background:

Week 1: Making things quickly Begin with a fun playground. Jump into an already-functioning sketch (e.g. unexpected lines drawn with shapes and noise) and change its variables. Experiment with generating many diverse outputs. Install artTab on browser.

Week 2: Language and library Understand the basic set-up, interface, syntax and command structure. Sketch with a library of shapes positioned on coordinates within a canvas. Coding Train 1.1-1.6. Contextualise with examples of programming art and generative art that explore relationality and randomness: Conway’s Game of Life, Every Icon by John F Simon Jr, Ringers by Dmitri Cherniak, Web by Jan Robert Leegte.

Week 3: Defining digital-native Interactivity, responsiveness and digital native art, beyond a fixed-size canvas. Mouse controls. Using map(). Coding Train 2.1-2.5. Contextualise with examples of code responsive to window size: Window by Jan Robert Leegte, and Unicurse by me.

Week 4: Dynamic movement Frame counts and animation. Make the circle bounce in the canvas. First use of conditional statements. If, then, else. Coding Train 3.1-3.4. Contextualise with animated examples from ArtBlocks (e.g. Vortex by Jen Stark, Cargo by Kim Asendorf, Pre-Process by Casey Reas but there are many), Towers by Andreas Gysin, the work of Leander Herzog, and Passage by Jason Rohrer.

Week 5: Multiples and infinites Using the for-loop. Coding Train 4.1-4.2. Contextualise with Himinn by Sarah Ridgely, Tych by rudxane, Patched Paradise by Anna Lucia, Impressions of Order by nbswwit, Very Large Array by Leander Herzog.

Week 6: Using functions - the machines within the machine. Coding Train 5.1-5.3. Starting to organise the structure of a sketch.

Week 7: Color Making color palettes, and the first application of arrays. Coding Train 7.1. and a color palette set up. Contextualise with JPEG by Jan Robert Leegte, Generations by Anna Lucia, the palettes of Terraforms by Mathcastles.

Online tools and resources offer a huge range of learning avenues. This list sets primary concepts that drive creative coding (language, library, interaction, animation, multiplication, conditional logic, loops, stored information) and that underpin the magnificent question it asks: What is the value of being able to manifest two or two thousand things and make them respond in random and relational ways?

Lost Home Worlds pays homage to the themes and anatomy of Mike Kelley’s Kandors series. Kelley initiated this work in 1999 and grew it over the subsequent decade into world-making across multiple works and media to directly explore a story:

The popular Superman story recounts the adventures of an alien being sent to Earth as a baby to escape the total destruction of his home planet Krypton. However, it turns out that Kandor was not, in fact, destroyed. Shrunk and bottled by a villain, the futuristic city was rescued by Superman and protected under a bell jar in his sanctuary, the Fortress of Solitude. For almost a quarter-century in comic-book time, Kandor and its miniature citizens survived in Superman’s care, sustained by tanks of atmosphere, a constant reminder of his lost past and a metaphor for his psychic disconnection from his adopted planet. [1]

The miniature world is a reminder of grief for fictional Superman, and for Kelley. And for Sam. For us all, maybe, these images associate something lost: The empty / full room, a shrunken world sustained in a jar.

The image of the bell jar as a tool of psychic disconnection is wrought in the cultural shadow of Sylvia Plath’s death. The Bell Jar is her darkly sharply funny semi-autobiographical story, in which the protagonist describes feelings of being trapped as if in a bell jar, in a life she hasn’t chosen. There are few innocent readings of Plath’s writing because of the heavy posthumous presence, and there’s an undercurrent of voyeurism in the protection of her memory, maintained in its own bell jar.

World-making

The castles in bell jars are little worlds within a world, a long-held human obsession. What’s the appeal? Simulated worlds grant power to whoever is imagining them, and the opportunity to create features without unwanted complexity, devise private games, program consistency and rules alongside absurdity and paradox. They are a creative coalescence of early 21st Century obsessions with virtual world-building, alternative universes, illusions, interface, video games, avatars.

Simulated worlds are also social spaces and social creations. Kelley was aware of this in his Kandor world-building in 1999:

Originally, my proposal for this work included a website where fans of Superman comics could log on and make proposals for the construction of a virtual version of Kandor. One of the things that interested me the most about Kandor is that there is no continuity in its depiction in Superman comics. Its skyline changes from story to story, making it impossible to truly reconstruct. An interactive computer program that would allow the city to be changed continuously, based on fan's input, would be a perfect reflection of the ambiguous nature of the city, and an appropriate model of memory's elusive nature.

... I also proposed to physically bring all of the Superman fans together who met on line via this project. Kandor-Con 2000 would then truly have functioned as a real celebration and meeting place for like-minded people. Of course, this was impossible. A number of large graphs and charts reveal the economic impossibility of bringing these people together. [2]

Kelley had ‘economically impossible plans’ to bring all the fans together in a global, dynamic, interactive social whirl of community building. If he could see us now.

In Kandor, Kelley transforms the emotional core of 2D Superman into real space and real forms and installations; from simple comic drawings to looming rooms and large scale sculptural pieces, illuminated and immersive. In Lost Home Worlds, Hains explores this world through code, through digital space and simulation. Code offers the ability to create almost infinite variables, stretching the 3D generative format to contain time, light, space along with the colourful spectrum of worlds in jars. Everything is variable and changeable, there are thousands of options. So, which one will I keep?

Memory

Unraveling memory is part of psychoanalysis, working out what moments caused the lifelong echo in a personal OS. The expectation is that you confront and strip away, acknowledge the central pain of a truth, then grow and heal. Padding around the truth are soft memories of childhood - a scent, a game, a cereal, a soundtrack, a cartoon, a car trip, a Saturday morning, vivid moments later revealed to have been photos (not memory) all along; feedback loops of a story of home and belonging. Nostalgia selectively adds rather than stripping back, building these fragments over and over, till the simulation solidifies into something at once bigger and smaller than reality.

The Lost Home Worlds, and the castles in bell jars they depict, are little things you hold in your hand and view, safe in your tiny screen. They are NFTs. You own the little world, you got to protect it. Stealing and entirely twisting Kundera’s words here: Nostalgia causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How important this moment was to us! The second tear says: How important to be deeply moved, together with my culture, by that moment [3]. That memory, long ago and distant, shrunken so small, a kernel of a moment now contained safe within a glass globe.

We can move around in these little Lost Home Worlds, the shadowy rooms and the illuminated memories of Superman’s long-gone home. Navigating with a mouse and keyboard in a way that we will soon tenderly recognise as early 2020s we can shift and pan to come up close to that other shrunken world in a jar. A simulation inside a simulation inside a simulation. Images, stories, moments and feelings made for us, and by us; trying to build future and past cultures concurrently, making homes for our avatar emotions.

[1] https://gagosian.com/exhibitions/2011/mike-kelley-exploded-fortress-of-solitude/

[2] https://www.eai.org/titles/superman-recites-selections-from-the-bell-jar-and-other-works-by-sylvia-plath

[3] Milan Kundera’s description of the ideology of kitsch, which I superficially reinterpreted for nostalgia. The actual quote is: "Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass!”

This one is focused on the creative learning process in course shape > experience > people.

I worry that articulating will diminish it, so know these classes were the highlight of my week and unlocked a pivot point in my life.

Shape

Held on twitch stream and in discord chat, free for any of the 1900 or so holders of a Terraforms NFT who wanted to join, no formal enrolment process, no announced end date. About 50 joined. Classes were a combination of p5.js tooling instruction, technology discussion and art review. Some moved methodically through programming techniques, most included delightful / dramatic detours into the spokes of culture and politics radiating from computing art in 2023.

Each class had a timbre, and the course had an arc shaped by accelerating content (classes got hard, fast) and accelerating context. The outside world came into the twice-weekly cocoon. It was a crypto winter, and the start of the course coincided with the exponential adoption of AI through Chat GPT, the end with an exponential zombie rise of memecoins, and in between the gutting of artist royalties and the fulsome realisation of digital art marketplaces as gambling dashboards.

Experience

Introduction to Computing Arts is a case study in learning by leaping. A group of amateur artists and coders with unstated competency pushed to an edge of fresh confusion then asked to lift up our eyes and refocus from the code loops to the context and back again. This creative vertigo is a counterpoint to Shiffman’s (also great) gently paced step-by-step tutorials.

The refocusing demanded by this ItCA teaching approach exercised a fundamentally human act: Skills and outputs directed by thought and feeling. AI acceleration met with a shrug or open arms is an inevitability of economic capture; where objectivity and judgements of cultural meaning are assumed not to mix; where explanations of what people do are detached from normative philosophies of why things matter to them; where human groups are understood as actors of practices without appreciating the meaning of those practices for them.

In a recent essay [here] Tina Rivers Ryan talks about distances between appreciating the tech and feeling the artwork. There is a tendency by some readings of computer art, she says, to privilege the medium, to become fixated on the affordances of a software program:

I don’t want to dismiss the importance of framing “art and technology” as technology, but I do wonder if our focus on how these works are made tends to inhibit our ability to also fully experience them as art, pushing us away instead of drawing us closer.

Focusing on technological traits and tools draw us much closer when we connect intentionally with the building blocks and machinery of our extremely real and incredibly tactile online experience, and engage with the way their everyday aesthetics shape how we view images, perceive color and light, touch screens, store, remember and remix digital media. The aim is both 1) see the technological traits as real parts of culture without nostalgia and without being overwhelmed by their sorcery, and 2) connect with what they are communicating independently of their cleverness.

Three moments from class where technological traits drew me closer:

1. Pixels: Engaging with the pixel as a materiality that has behaviours and relational complexity. Zooming in to comprehend its fixed yes/no existence, zooming out to see the rigid primitive fold through multiplication till you no longer see it. (Also considered in this talk by artist Jeffrey Alan Scudder).

2. Keyboard controls: The narrowed viewport and game-based interactivity of keyboard controls in artwork Passage bringing the viewer close to the entwined aesthetic and emotion (familiarity, nostalgia, intimacy, brevity, endings).

3. The empty array: No matter how many times I use them, I’m hit by the weird power of the empty brackets [] as a place for storing an unknown quantity of unknown visual elements, and how from this agnostic and simple command can spring abundant and serendipitous outcomes to surprise the operator.

In each moment, shifting gaze from new code learned (foreground) to the connected materiality and meaning of computer art (middle ground) to its presence in yonder intersection of art and technology and (horizon) its embedding in our relationships with and within culture and society.

People

It isn’t normal for a busy artist and project founder to dedicate hours each week to teaching a free course, it isn’t normal as an amateur artist or coder to be taught by one of the best, it really isn’t normal for a 6700-member NFT discord to be a soothing cocoon, and for it to feel this productive.

People from many timezones and sleep schedules joined the class, meaning we responded to shared work and questions in a rolling asynchronous chat. Classmates giving extended creative feedback and technical suggestions in my DMs shocked me with their generosity. Despite some obvious baked-in fundamentals, in that the class was quite nerdy, people with a wide range of creative and code backgrounds (or neither) attended. 14 of us presented final projects. After chatting in text to anon avatars for over 100 hours, voice chat in the concluding weeks of final project crits (and some clues of gender and geography) felt close and gently moving.

Among the cohort and during the course, Neokry launched Persistence, a permissionless contract and front-end to enable minting p5.js works, and offered invitations to test it. So far, seven of us have used it to mint and sell NFTs. The Mathcastles art stream, home to the meditative delight of watching 113 work on Terraforms upgrades, is now open to the cohort to also stream on.

Class is dismissed, but we are still making and learning loosely together. So much to be gained from each other in this subculture setting; creativity sustained by connection, finding porosity in boundaries, building scaffolds for openness instead of cynicism.

1. Beginner computing arts mindset

2. Holding the mirror self

3. How to do nothing while coding

4. Being creative

Setup

When I first began learning p5.js, I heard artist Matt Kane talk about his recovery from a life-fracturing event, supported by the meditative practice of developing creative coding systems. At the time, I was moving coloured ellipses around a digital canvas, showing my friends like I was 8 and it was my rock collection (still am, sorry about that). Now, a year later, I’m more convinced that creative coding can be a deeply sustaining practice filling all kinds of everyday voids. To make sense of some of those void-filling capabilities I reflect on the three vectors of my own experience: The methodical practice of learning new skills via Daniel Shiffman’s enthusiastic videos (how to do it), the surprisingly amniotic discords of NFT communities pumping ideas (what to make / make it better), and the revelation of learning by unlearning through a chaotic-brilliant live and fluid computing arts course gifted by artist 113. The sketches included below were created during the first few weeks of that course - seeds, scribbles, test systems, fragments. They look silly, but behind them are personally profound steps forward. Like therapy, the work happens inside.

1. Beginner computing arts mindset

Whereas creating in flow state depends on a level of expertise and control, creating with a beginners’ mindset embraces instability, mutability, un-surety. The concept was pilfered from the zen Shoshin, applied to calligraphy and martial arts among other specialised extremely-non-beginner practices. Beginner mindset isn’t necessarily naive, it’s open to possibility. Expert mindset isn’t necessarily sophisticated, it’s fixed on a target. Both states are fragile for different reasons.

A computing arts beginner mindset allows confusion to be piqued, rolling on the waves of not understanding why is this happening and not what I expected to happen, fucking around, finding out, glimpsing control for a moment, then releasing it when a new confusion breaks over you. A ride.

Creative coding interfaces support beginners’ mindset more than a high pressure blank sheet of paper because they give immediate feedback, conjure it here in the left window, and see it there in the right, allowing a gentle incremental leap into making before you know what to make, following along with Shiffman and sometimes (often) not understanding the logic, and being ok with that. The ‘rightness or error’ of code provides a scaffold for learning creatively, and allows a kind of open play that is an energising space for amateurs, professionals, degens and serious art collectors, nurturing the making and the owning of computer art as ripples of the same dynamic. More on that here.

2. Holding the mirror self

Making something and sharing it is no innocent practice. Everyone’s personal code runs this loop or something similar:

if (I am proud of it && I think they will like it){ share hope for heart reacts }

Sharing a png of a sketch is a vulnerable act asking for aesthetic judgement, sharing the code itself amplifies this - saying to anons you respect: check out my intellectual failures written clearly.

Looking glass self is the relational phenomenon where individuals understand their sense of self through what they perceive to be others’ views of them. A kind of circle where being / performing is modified by the reflections of ourselves that we think we see in others’ appraisals. A conga line of imagined judgements. This can obviously be damaging, i.e. being very online. Alternately, practicing holding rather than feeding the mirrored self can be critically grounding and anti-insular.

By holding the mirrored self I mean embracing the social sharing potentials of computer art and showing off ones guts: the basic, pastiched, codified aesthetic languages absorbed and shoehorned, and the imperfect, dirty spaghetti code. And then asking people to look at it, while you look at theirs, cushioned by anonymised relationships that focus on the work not person - a buffer to undeserved self-judgement and unearned self-satisfaction.

This is possible through the global networks clustered around projects like Mathcastles and 113’s Intro to Computing Arts course. And, it’s possible because creative coding is open on web and can be always in progress. I can open someone’s sketch and learn how they made it, I can modify variables to test it, I am playing in their WIP and reflecting it back on mine. This practice has been the true miracle of NFTs - opening new gaps new wormholes for a community to form around artist and work as they develop, all the way along the amateur-professional spectrum.

3. How to do nothing while coding

The challenge is to resist wringing productivity out of a practice which is all about efficiency. It’s like in meditation (acknowledge the discomfort, back to the breath) where constantly rejecting mental distraction gradually builds rather than weakens focus on that thing beyond whatever lists of unachieved needs, desires, expectations, hours grind in your own head.

The challenge is to resist projecting finished outcomes out of a practice which is all about production. It’s like gardening (is it like gardening?) where menial work one day is repeated the next. Am I being completely present, I wonder, while visualising the validation I’ll taste in the cherry tomatoes that will burst from the dry seeds I am right now pushing into the dirt.

Creative coding practices join meditation, gardening, walking in the roses, as another (easier) way to be fully present. Deceptively effortless, deceptively hard, multi-tasking prohibitive. A lot of methodical repetition, a lot of incrementing, a rhythm. What’s harder is to remove from your mind the juicy cherry tomato before the plant’s even blossomed, to resist seeing everything you do, every silly sketch, as a future NFT to be sold. Acknowledge the ambition, back to the loop in front of you. This, then that. If, then, else.

4. Being creative

Creativity is a wind, not a well. An action, not a talent or resource. I don’t know if artists feel this fear - that the thing you are currently working on is the last idea you will have - and then this relief - that inspiration is everywhere, both infinite and rare.

Creative coding is a revelation because it puts making something from nothing (literally the act of creation) into a convenient, everyday, accessible format of computer and internet connection. Because creativity is an action, making something even without a clear vision invariably leads down pleasant and rough pathways to an array of cool or bad outcomes. Share, consider, talk about it enough to slowly, socially, help clarify why we are using this medium? What are the values of being able to draw ten thousand things in one second and make them move in random and relational ways? Where will we take it? Where will it take us?

But, even before attempting to parse fully formed computing art meta meaning and purpose, there’s a very basic motivator that, as with all self-help, is kind of obvious - making, creating, sharing is good for you.

Ownership underpins NFTs, so looking back on the projects minted this year kind of aches in a personal way, within the communal ache of a generally bad year, and the wider ache of time lost, moments passing, everything / nothing changing. Looking at the jpgs can transport to that urgent dopamine moment in a different time. It’s like listening in December to your most played song from February, but the artist got paid.

Seasons, not years, are the right unit to chart change and remember time. Nothing to do with the weather, but collective rhythms, phases and cycles. More cultural, less cosmic. Do you remember what was 2021 and what was 2020? I don’t, but I remember the feeling of these past four seasons and the evidence is immutably on chain.

Ali Smith’s 4 Seasons

In 2016, Scottish author Ali Smith asked her publisher: what’s the quickest we can ship? She wanted to reconnect with the novel’s immediacy, resurfacing that literary format’s origins as instalments released locally and in the moment, the setting completely real but not yet history. She wrote and published one novel each year, one for each season, written in the season. History took over anyway: Brexit, Trump, Covid-19. Yet, these major events are not centred in the novels. The lockdown and fear of early stage pandemic hovers at the edges of the minutiae of her characters’ daily lives and relationships which are their (and, as the reader, our) focus. It’s a peripheral anxiety for us too, we are living in the same space and time.

Smith centers an artist in each novel (Pauline Boty, Barbara Hepworth, Tacita Dean, Lorenza Mazzetti) and it’s through encounters with their works that the novels’ characters examine their own worlds.

This from Summer:

Creativity is cultural not because it is derivative of it, but because it aims to heal culture. Art saturated with the unconscious acts like a compensatory dream in the individual: it tries to rebalance and address deep-rooted problems.

The diagram of Smith’s layered seasonal novels is therefore four concentric circles: A barely-there us forming a protective shell to the kernel of me, culture (meaning) anchoring us, and history happening all around, colouring the scent and mood of each season, now and then puncturing through, shaking us, and completely changing everything / nothing. The chronos of the seasons cycles on, and the kairos - the qualitative moments - break through.

The four seasons of NFTs 2022 Wrapped:

In Smith’s novel , winter is the gradual reveal of truths beneath the lonely and claustrophobic environment of a country home at Christmas. Winter makes things visible. Holding your circle near, staying close to home. It was my summer in December and January, but continuing pandemic wave travel restrictions kept us rolling around local parks close to home, minting friends’ projects at the kitchen table, early morning sunlight streaming in. Clouds on Chains is an iconic first mint. Nuxui my first (only) executed post-mint flip and post-pump re-entry for the one that I wanted.

Spring blossoms with hope, not. Spring brought Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and inflating economies and obvious multi-collapse ahead. In Smith’s novel, spring is about escape; the real and heavy escape of war-time refugees, as well as the overwhelming urge to drop everything and disappear from a mid-life mid-work crisis. A lot of clever NFT projects (plus owls and ape land) launched in Spring (ha!, we said, what bear market!). For me it was Unix Days, good to mint whenever you remember, whenever a pink day comes up, and Silk Road, the shifting colours duly replicated by low light through leaves around the easter full moon.

Summer, Smith notes, comes from the Old English sumor, meaning both one and together. I guess it’s time for big fun energetic pfp projects in communal celebration. Allstarz and Finiliar wormed their way in with unhinged cuteness and drip and (say the words) extremely pleasant discord vibes. I also minted lots of flowers and Tsunflower Chaos (above). Abundant.

The opening line of the novel Autumn is an unambiguous Dickens: ‘It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times.’ Late autumn has had some historical bad times, more bad times to come. I cycled what I made from selling my own small collection into NFT art grails: Terraforms, Heaven Computer, and Tombs. With the exception of Tomb’s Shadow House (the most stressful mint in history) these were slow and uncomplicated purchases chosen outside of any rarity calculations or urgency - a floor Terraforms because I liked the colour and animation, a floor Heaven Computer because of this line in the metadata: Walking towards your dreams is important, but knowing when to walk away is just as important.

Chronos ticks on, but kairos bursts out. Each of these mints, the art and the memory, has personal importance to me. As well as flex and/or parsed cultural meaning, NFT galleries might also be on-chain journals.

To end, this passage from Autumn, which visualises chronos and captures the fleeting convictions of worth and value in a fragile and chaotic art-world:

Time flies, Elisabeth said. Well, yes. It can do, Daniel said. Literally. Watch this.

Elisabeth doesn’t remember much of the above. She does remember, though, the day they were walking along the canal bank when she was small and Daniel took his watch off his wrist and threw it into the water. She remembers the thrill, the absolute not-doneness of it.

She remembers there were two boys down on the rocks and they turned their heads as the watch arced through the air and over them and hit the canal, and she remembers knowing that it was a watch, Daniel’s watch, not just any old stone or piece of litter, flying through the air, and knowing too that there was no way those boys could know this, that only she and Daniel knew the enormity of what he’d just done.

She remembers that Daniel had given her the choice, *to throw or not to throw. *She remembers she chose to throw. She remembers coming home with something amazing to tell her mother.

The labyrinth model is done in museum theory, but it offers a couple of useful ways of thinking about the digital gallery that release it from static folio or uncanny physical derivative, and that help link some art-archive-ownership-community vectors:

• Bounded discovery: Connections in an atomised field

• Bounded agency: Friction and personalisation in online experience

• Mapping collective meaning and value

Discovery

A labyrinth typically has one entrance and the objective is to get to the centre and then return. Unlike a maze (built to confuse, for fun, with multiple branches of dead-end paths) the traditional labyrinth is unicursal, winding and complex sure, but not trickery, built to slow down and protect. If you just keep following the thread/s you can noodle your way to the centre, and you can get back. A simplified model of the unicursal labyrinth is popular in museum design (like the Guggenheim spiral) and retail design (like IKEA) as a way to organise and control the relationship between artefacts/products and consumers.

In online space, the labyrinth model offers a kind of structured discovery that anchors the confusion of a tide of digital assets. Discoverability is less than useless on most NFT platforms, limited to tracking wallets or entering the name of a collection or its fake into a search bar. The worst discoverability tools will be Amazonian if you like that you’ll probably like this. The best will leverage thematic and community connections that exist in narrow knowledge segments, and layer them into a collective catalogue of projects, art, ideas, assets, things that matter to people.

The labyrinth functions as a map of things (each in its place, relational to the others, and providing directions to get there), and it functions as an on-ground experience of one-on-one immediacy, like a lantern spotlighting just a couple of feet ahead of you in a vast shadowed space. Ideally, we can hold these two scales and levels of understanding simultaneously - the big (reductive) picture of everything all at once, and one individual’s careful and subjective knowledge of that specific artefact, that one snowflake, just so.

Agency

Related to discovery, agency in the labyrinthine model is relational rather than an act of individual determination. Labyrinthine museum theory may be old, but the desire to collapse the separation between museum-goer, artefact and museum space is resonant with today’s art and collector communities (eg. NFT communities) where participant replaces audience. In the DYLABY LABYRINT exhibition in 1962, artists and curators structured environments and pathways to actively engage the audience in chance encounters, contrasts, interactions with objects and spaces. This description from the catalogue has resonance with NFT art communities:

Artists gathered from several countries with the aim to let the public participate in their work to let you see, feel, and cooperate with them

they start from daily life the sensations you get feeling your way through a labyrinth the surprise when you open a door the freshness of the coloured world of plastic the machine that moves but without practical purpose the shooting gallery where you don’t destroy but help to colour the objects

six artists in seven rooms created surroundings full of variety gay and weird – loud and silent where you may laugh, get excited or thoughtful

you are not outside the objects but constantly within them as part of a whole. [1]

Moving through a labyrinth intentionally slows movement and narrows focus. This friction has the effect of gently gating progress from outsider to insider. You are free to move anywhere, but you can’t just go everywhere immediately. The more you engage, the more you participate, the deeper you get, the more you come to know the space, and the more you leave a mark for others, in directions, interpretations, and rearranged and found objects on the way.

Mapping value

The labyrinth experience is a kind of dark wandering, but it’s also a collective project of sense-making and value-defining. I guess the community made the labyrinth in a burst of construction, and I guess the community now maps it and describes its many pathways and the things it contains, how to get to them, and why they matter.

Online, without material or spatial limits, the labyrinth can be infinite. But it offers a contained conception of infinity - one step ahead of the next, this then that - folded like a never-ending intestine not expanded like a galaxy or maths. The unicursal form is not necessary in online space, but it’s useful for welcoming and guiding extremely-non-fractal humans who can only hold onto a couple dozen ideas at once.

Messy interrelational meaning-making between artifact / creator and audience/collector is human intimacy in vast internet space, distinct from a one-way archive pit made possible by bottomless servers, and distinct from traditional top-down dogma and critique. Someone/s still has to emotionally labour to define cultural value and communicate meaning beyond each intimacy, each niche. The methodology of building and mapping the labyrinth - one connected but infinite thread, a scrunched up cluster of overlapping pathways, many crevices, the ability to link everything in map and one thing in intimacy - is a useful way of thinking about curation decentralised to many participants, many owners.

[1] DYLABY (Dynamisch Labyrint), exh. cat. (Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 1962), discussed by Noit Banai in ‘The Labyrinth as an Exhibitionary Model: Form, Event, and Mode of Life’, Stedelijk Studies Journal, Issue 7, 2018, https://stedelijkstudies.com/journal/the-labyrinth-as-an-exhibitionary-model-form-event-and-mode-of-life/#_edn9

2 Psy Ops?

4 Community focused NFT project?

8 The first stage of !denzadol launched last week.

16 It’s a study in balancing the three circles of the NFT Venn - art, attention, and incentive.

32 Summary first: !denzadol is a multistage generative 3D series bringing together fine art and NFT utility. Designed to sustainably establish over time, the project intentionally experiments with incentives, utility, easter egg rarity.

64 It’s created by an established artist, going anon for this collection to grant the freedom to deliver an experimental project, and as a deliberate offshoot from their existing practice. From the discord: “I approach it the same way a music producer might do, where they may release a white label record remix and put it out as a limited release under a different alias.”

128 All rarity features are not immediately apparent. In the first stage of the project (1024 original artworks) 3D generative particle and flow techniques create rarity through different shape and intensity. Collectors accustomed to looking only at their piece’s standard rarity properties may have missed the additional ID; a number that links to the seminal Fidenza series from which the colours are inspired. 999 of the 1024 !denzadol works therefore have a direct 1:1 relationship to each Fidenza. A beautiful day in the discord as new owners searched for this link. Does the relationship mean anything? Does it grant utility (i.e. cold hard eth)? Maybe one day. For now, it adds another layer of depth and interest, an expansive rather than extractive state of being in the NFT milieu.

256 !denzadol intentionally experiments with incentives and utility. As a format, NFTs offer the ability to structure art collections to leverage culture and community (through a suddenly global online audience, a cracking pace of change, and a spotlight on digital art), and to transparently reveal rather than cynically veil the financial features that underpin them. NFTs are an opportunity to play with both wealth-building and community/culture-building.

The owners of four special (randomly minted) !denzadol pieces earn a place on the team in terms of receiving fortnightly splits of the secondary sales revenue. The aim is to test both the concept (how it delivers benefits, how the community responds) and the tools (in this case using 0xSplits). Experiments in Stage 1 can unfold further structures of utility in the subsequent stages, with confidence that they will work culturally and financially.

In a multi-stage project, there are clearly going to be other incentives for all owners beyond “the art”. The first drop (18 March) was still images. The second and third drops (planned for April and May) are animated pieces. As everyone here can’t bloody stop saying: a week is a year in NFTs, February 2022 was 3 years ago, web3 is 24/7. How do you make a creative project that sustains at this pace, over this 3-month timeframe and beyond? Beyond hitting a rare jackpot, how can a team shape the mechanics to support sustainable growth rather than purely profit for team and early minters? Luck, care, objectively interesting art, inclusive community building, and gentle, transparent game theoretics.

512 Roadmap roadmap roadmap! The project roadmap is a sideways triangle. The number of pieces released in each stage is half of the last. There were 1024 original works in stage 1, 512 in stage 2 and 256 in stage 3 are confirmed, and there are hints at 128, 64, (32? 16? 8?) in potential future unannounced stages. While the quantity of each release decreases, the complexity increases, both for the art (more intricate animation, environments, lighting, 3d generative simulations), and for the utility (future mechanics for splits and incentives are being discussed, an NFT that pays dividends dynamically, expanding the tools tested in Stage 1). So, quantity increases slowly, in a controlled and structured way, while creativity deepens. It’s a strategy to combat human fight-or-flight (copium-or-FUD) reflexes, to resist the crowd surge that can both pump and crash floors and leave unhappy bags for all but a few, and to allow the longer time-frames and increased effort required for more complex artwork. The sideways triangle is a focusing pathway to generating more complex and valuable creative outputs, that in turn will enrich the whole collection.

The disciplined project roadmap structure (3-stage release of diminishing numbers) and the published incentives (airdrops and chances to mint based on the special !denzadols) are fixed. Yet, from the beginning, the artist has reserved the right to experiment fluidly within this structure, to recalibrate and rebalance the vectors between attention, incentive and art as the project develops. Expect surprise, easter eggs, application of new technology (both for the art and the utility), experimentation, variation, diversion, iteration, conversation, consideration, augmentation, fortification…

The project roadmap is a sideways triangle with many potential tributary journeys.

Structure provides certainty for investors, fluidity adapts, and adds interest and surprise.

The whole project is a balance and tension between structure and fluidity:

Structure: Utility

Fluid: The art

Structure: Uniform box frames

Fluid: Swirling silky tufts, soft plasticine noodles

Fluid: The idea, the creative spark, genesis of the series

Structure: The maths and simulations of 3D generation and rendering

Structure: Data-mining colour-ways from Fidenza

Fluid: A joyful explosion of 3-dimensional colour surprise

Structure: The mint process (or is that also big fluid energy?)

Fluid: The future possible uses of each piece, granted by CC0 copyright

Structure: Categories and rarity features

Fluid: Subjective aesthetic pull of some over others, rarity aside

Fluid: Experimenting with and discussing owner and supporter incentives

Structure: Owner incentives written into the contract

Structure: The roadmap - halving supply over multiple parts

Fluid: The roadmap - increasing complexity over multiple parts

Structure: The Ethereum blockchain

Fluid: The general channel on the discord

Structure: The art

Fluid: Utility

To be a genuinely interesting NFT project (rather than an art project sold as an NFT, or a token sold as art – both are also cool to do) there is an energising dynamic between the maths and art, between left and right brain creativity, between conviction of logic and conviction of change and experimentation, between the way people think they are (rational) and the way we are (emotional, scared, loving, fallible, connected, stubborn, fleeting).

1024 The way we are. Bundles of fear, attachment, and reflex. The edict underpinning the instructional success of any product is to know your audience and the problem you are solving for them. The problem of boring art, the problem of diminished wealth, the problem of not enough people to chat to. Those universal fears, attachments and reflexes of art, money, people and time. What more do you need to know about your audience? That they like moving colours, to be on mint-lists, rarity and clout? You’re not narrowing it down.

The groups in the NFT landscape are not homogenous. Because they come from many time-zones, countries, cultures, subcultures and Los Angeles, because everyone is an opt-out rather than opt-in anon, because we know each other through signals and symbols, or at most 40-character interactions and emotes, knowing your audience is a dizzy exercise in wild categorising or self-identifying. Those artists, those whales, my degens. Imagine three (more) circles which begin to overlap until it’s just one.

Groups have different energy. Maybe it really is all just vibes. In astrology practice there are three modalities or energies – mutable, fixed and cardinal. Cardinal modalities initiate action (with birth-dates at the beginning of seasons), fixed modalities are stable (the middle of the season), and those born under signs with mutable modalities move us to open and adapt to whatever ‘season’ comes next. I’m not scared to claim here that it’s often the artistic energy that is most fixed and the mutable degen energy that opens up to movements and change, not through any flaws or strengths of their own character, but because that is how crowds in volatility work.

It's a social tendency to separate, to tell stories about other groups to crystalise your own identities, strengthen our own communities. I’m a Capricorn because I’m not a Gemini, a boomer because I’m not a zoomer, a sceptic because I’m not pilled. But, for most larger-than-boutique art collections, separating and categorising the NFT space is useless - if you are creating and selling to yourself that’s a small and insular group, something not historically attempted by professional artists.

The transparency and clout that define NFT behaviours render the barriers between the different groups invisible, or at least ineffective. There are multi-layered overlaps between serious art appreciation, degen community foam, and investor money movement; artists suddenly make money, degens turn investors, and investors and degens collect serious art. Always has been. In astrology (sorry, again), despite the great sun-sign monopoly of the 20th century magazine horoscope, no one is ever just one type. As in astrology, in the creation, collection and selling of NFTs. The aim is to be aware of and balance positive and negative tendencies – nurture enthusiasm / temper exaggeration, be adaptive / resist unhinged vacillation, invest sustainably don’t dominate or manipulate, create more than criticise. We can try to categorise, but good luck with that keeping that spreadsheet tidy.

Groups have different energy, but groups also have the same energy. A somewhat shared language beneath the private jokes and signals, a funny or poignant or cryptic name on the same discord, and apart from the clippings at the top and bottom extremities of the graph, a more or less synchronised movement in the waves of asset exchange. There’s no separate market/s for art, something special, it’s all just different sized twigs in a big twig-current that we have somehow collectively made by valuing things and exchanging them for other things. Categories of NFT players (makers, collectors, flippers) can’t be split for long, and nor should they. Innovations, stories, tastes may start life in their distinct groups, but they will soon flow out or fold in. We (Vitalik?) made the structure and now we have the flow of code, of value, ideas, expanding rather than extracting (but also extracting). We have chains, plans, permissionless protocols, hyper-structures, immutable tokens, servers, lots of code.

Yet, it feels like there is no structure, in this frothy under-prepared world of unexpected cartoons, new-ness and nostalgia, hype, artists making it big, devs definitely doing something, clever roadmaps, articulate pitches, green pills, a $7m relief effort via NFT, supporting your friends, tumbling into rabbit hole parties, intriguing metadata, detective work on wallets, in twitter spaces watching it unfold, 4am wake-ups for… something, I mean, yesterday I minted an NFT of a colour because it was such a perfect subtle concept and I loved the peachy tone, sudden attachment to a piece of code, I mint eggs, coloured spheres, chains, clouds, new shoes and windows, and they are exciting and rare to me. Of course with this: the other side of the same energy. The scams and bots and larpers and drops, pump and dumps, podcast alpha, cash grabs that fall flat, mints below floor, mints above floor, paradigms, derivatives, too-big collections of art, colourful wrappers of nothing, digital micro-plastics, a sweaty dread that it’s just all shit and you’re in it somehow. There is a narrow needle-eye where it is possible to get a kind of balance of these divergent astrologies of optimism and churn, to maintain a mutually sustaining equilibrium of creation, value and community, with mechanics and rules, structures and micro incentives to keep us moving forward without falling in a stream that’s too fluid, too chaotic, too full, and also too thin, empty, fleeting. I could keep going. More liquid, unravelling, my covid-addled or just delusional brain trying to add words, make content, contribute to the floating bubbles and weighted blankets, a stream of consciousness, with hardly any structure stopping me beyond the seemingly shared rules of a common language, and even that is mutable and changeable, and if I strip that final structure away – nonsense, next to nothingness, empty runes and ineffective binary commands serving zero purpose 01100100 01100101 01101110 01111010 01100001 01100100 01101111 01101100. Which is why I’ve persisted with this unnecessary but ultimately satisfying essay word-count structure. 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024. A tribute to !denzadol and some numbers to give meaning. If you have read this far, post some abacus emoji reacts in the general channel and await more alpha.

Some of my best friends are coders and their coloured text on black screen { tap tap tap semi-colon } activity always seemed puzzling yet deeply uninteresting to me - runes for a dumb computer. Then Daniel Shiffman arrived in my life via hundreds of youtube videos and The Coding Train - short tutorials teaching p5.js creative coding from the beginning. The beginning. This guy, Shiffman, is a hero and an icon. In an age of alleged soft skills and storytellers, there is only one (it’s Shiffman) who can so clearly and enthusiastically communicate fundamentals of code to non-coders.

Starting with nothing (literal blank screen, empty brain) and creating something is an amniotic miracle. Doing it in the open play zone of childlike wonder, before your own (let alone others’) expectations have caught up, is a joy. The strict ‘rightness’ or error of code gift a solid scaffold for the skill-free to learn creatively - through iteration, experimentation, trial and try again.

As you learn more you start to panic, internalised capitalism asking: What are you making? Why are you doing this? What will you gain? Yet, still, when I open each ‘work’ on my phone I feel a rare emotion of satisfaction and ownership. I smile watching the loop animate, and I send it to friends (sorry) as if I were proud of it (I am).

I want to say that this private and shared emotion of pride and ownership (could we call it a thrill of belonging?), and this mental space of joyful open play and experimentation is the fertile grounding for digital online on-chain art. I want to draw lines between the making and the having, because they are the same ripples.

Like other forms of art ownership, NFT digital art ownership wraps together object, story, and moment.

The object is the work itself. Obviously the thinly-generative things I’m creating with Shiffman’s guidance are not art, yeah ok some of the generative patterns sold as NFTs are not Art, a lot of it definitely is. At the beginning of an epic conversation about poetry and (digital / physical) primacy, David Rudnick talks about art history as per the perspective of Christopher S Wood, who traces the cultural actions and relations by which artifact becomes artwork. The art object Wood is interested in is not only the object of extreme value (the painting, the sculpture), but the components of collective visual culture. The objects embedded in the culture not outside of it.

Art (as objects of extreme value) moved into the public gallery, but we still want to own it. That’s me in the gallery gift shop, buying the exhibition postcard because seeing the work moved me to purchase a token. What am I gonna do with this card? Look at it and remember, maybe feel that same thrill. The emotional connection to the work isn’t aesthetic or technical judgement, but a personal story of witnessing it, layered in a wider (changeable) cultural story of what it means and why it’s of value (for now). The story builds the link between the object and its meaning.

Shoehorning this in here, talk about Story!… Peter Schjeldahl, long-time art critic at The New Yorker, describing collecting bits of the wall that 1989 night in Berlin:

“A small hammer I bought in Berlin at the beginning of this month dislodged only sparks and dust from the Wall - that sucker is hard - so I had to glean bits from tailings left by better armed others. Had to? It did occur to me as I grubbed in the dirt that such keenness for crumbs of concrete, with or without the traces of spray enamel that elated me when found, might be idiotic. But yeah, had to. That’s the way with collecting, which no sooner battens on a species of a thing than it applies a hierarchy of qualities - size, presence of spray paint - for greed to glamorize. Once you let something symbolize - let a wall be the Wall - you are lost to yourself and must possess it to be whole again.” (7 Days, December 27, 1989)

The moment is the abundant occasion of bringing the art/Art into being (shopping, hunting, catching it). In a recent essay Waiting for the “Drop”: Crypto-art and Speed A. V. Marraccini captures the pace of minting (“You will miss the drop. there will be 10,000 pieces of new work before you wake up in the morning.”). But rather than being a lonely solo 4am AEST experience, minting from a launch is fizzy with (online) social build up and release. If you’re buying from mint you are probably also on the discord, and bearing witness to a collection release and sell out. The joy is greater than just that of the financial value pump ascribed to your piece of it, although that of course plays a part. This feeling is important. Even if what you’re buying is serious Art, minting is play, flipping is (can be) play, collecting is (can be) play.

There’s an obsession with scarcity and rarity features of NFTs. This obsession is also play. For the creator, NFTs have abundance features. Artists like Case Simmons and Figure31 have talked about the expansive reach and the joyful looseness of being able to experiment and disseminate generative work online like this. (Case: The infrastructure of the traditional gallery can't hold all the artists to make the community thrive; Figure31: Trying to print 1000 images in a dark room, it is so much fucking work). These are artists at the other (expert) side of the graph, but it feels like they are also having fun activating the open play zone for us.

It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye. Malicious scams, theft, pump and dump, financialization accelerationism, boring or derivative or bad work produced and replicated, the dilution of Art, a pile of non-stop stuff building up without humans parsing it for meaning. Hanging in the edge of the Dunning Krueger has value, as long as you realise you are there. The damage happens in the painful transition between knowing nothing and knowing something, and determining what that something is.

Nuxui, Nic’s new NFT series, is made of 333 compositions of strange (yet familiar) objects, mechanic and organic fragments, tactile materials, and thick atmospheres. The arrangements grow and decay across the spectrum of the series. They are overlaid with still and moving blurs and held within the frame of a digital viewport. The pieces are captivating - decorative talismans / liquifying circuitboards.

The elements of the compositions - objects, material, atmosphere, viewport, growth + decay, spectrum - are common threads in Nic’s work. Trying to describe Nuxui means following and unravelling these threads.

I scroll distractedly through his retired tumblr to see the 3D forms and visual atmospheres evolve and layer up across a ten year back-catalogue. Nic opines generously on twitter and discord but doesn’t talk earnestly about his work, so I open the archives to remind myself. Scrolling right down to the bottom of the page, a video of scratchy 3D and pixels is a visual accompaniment for IWAAD, a track by London producer Actress. Nic sent it to Actress like, hi, I made this. Since this meeting, his visuals have often augmented Actress’ music videos, record art and concerts.

So, there is another layer here beyond the visual components: Music community and social dynamics, growing a solo creative practice into shared culture, making things and connecting.

What are the strange objects?

Fragments from a rocky wilderness and from an electronics factory. Each piece is a precious artifact or discarded detritus, or both. Some are relics of a hyper-real still life, some are basic forms that have been stretched / squished / fractured / carved. The 3D generated forms are the mechanics of digital model production; the subtractive or additive actions that create concave or convex contours, sharp and rounded terrain, respecting and warping the rules of gravity and space.

The strange objects have a real-world tactility. Elemental materials – shiny metal, cool stone, powdery chalk, molten oily plastic, salt, opaque resin, porosity, gloss, rough, matte, liquid, heavy; like you can pick them up in your palm and feel their density and surface. They are born digital, but anchored to the tactile IRL world of urban and natural landscapes.

Some atmospheres in Nic’s work:

• A darkened house, like a forbidding display home, thick smoke rolls through the rooms and coloured light breaks through, laser-like.

• A forest, dappled light, mossy rocks, hanging mist, sunlight glistening on stone steps covered in blood.

• Under water, a flooded post-modernist atrium, Rodin’s The Thinker submerged with smooth marble glistening while office-palm fronds move in the current, bubbles bubble and a school of fish flickers.

• Golden rays of low-angled light penetrate a disquieting space overlooking clouds and a smoking city.

• Kinetic particles synch across giant LED screens on a hot late summer night in a dusty field under a really wide sky.

The atmospheres are immersive multi-sensory landscapes from nature, city, and club, with music at their core. Nic calls them visual accompaniments because they look and feel like the music. The synchronicity between the visual and the sound is a kind of mutual construction, without one exogenous to the other. (In other words, a collaboration).

The origins of most of Nic’s collaborations are global, remote, and online, including through social links forged on the music forums of the early 2000s where he was *prolific*.

A screen is therefore an intuitive 3D/2D viewport device used in his work. Screens are added as frames and surfaces in his still and moving images. They function like a stage-set to control focus and composition within uncontrollable and multiple viewing contexts (printed, on a phone, a computer, various video platforms, in landscape / portrait, in an endless sea of tiny squares).

The screen contains the image or video and anchors the way it is viewed and understood in the free-flowing all-sharing web.

Then, as in Nuxui, taking the tangible presence of the screen further – a frame, plus the film of a visible surface, and blurred overlays that animate and pass over and filter the viewport. Different levels of opacity give 3-dimensionality to that thing we take for granted as a 2D plane to stare through.

Culture and community evolves, exchanges, transforms. Culture grows organically / generatively, through Fibonacci-style maths (links x people x velocity + chaos), and through experiment, and hardly ever intentionally. You put something out there and someone responds, it moves beyond the resolve of any solo creator. Culture grows in mutable Gemini ways. A kind of thank u, next with no break-ups. Layering, but also easily discarding and moving on, a gentle killing of darlings, two or ten ideas at once.

Growth and decay is a visual and thematic preoccupation in Nic’s work.

First in the generative simulations that create particle swarms and changes of elemental state (melting, fracturing, crystalising, exploding), and the generative interactions of pixels and RGB layers (to get very technical) across thousands of rendered frames. Second, in the way both his figurative and abstract work echos shifting natural and urban landscapes – always enduring, always changing.

Back to January 2022, to Nuxui. A full spectrum of tactile objects, atmosphere, viewports, growth and decay. The nuxui (plural) stretch across minimal, subtle, dark, shiny, intense, bright, vivid, glowing, liquid, heavy extremes. And, as in all Nic’s work, dripping in detail and colour. This is ‘Set 8’ of the 9 sets:

The spectrum is not a binary, (black to white with greys in between), but multi-dimensional, loose, adding an ‘n’ axis to the x, y and z.

The scale (333 - enabled by the platforms and culture of showing and selling art through NFTs) reveals Nic’s experimental process. The groups of nuxui are less ‘variations of a theme’, more the witnessing of the invention of that theme as it is uncovered and pushed to extremes that test its elasticity. Nuxui doesn’t feel like a concept NFT project with an idea executed, nor is it a static final outcome. It is a snapshot of 3-months’ experimentation in ideas and techniques. You can see the making and crafting as the tones, techniques, patterns and parts evolve over the spectrum of pieces.

Stasis is death. The culture and themes underpinning Nuxui, shared and housed online and on-chain, will continue as threads - more collaborations, maybe music, maybe new works, wider community. Growing, changing, all these wormholes opening up.

Nuxui by Nic Hamilton is released 22nd January 2022 at nuxui.art

https://nuxui.art/

This is what density and lightness look like in artist Case Simmons’ 2021 Clouds on Chains series:

To start with, two decades browsing the infinity of images on the web. Searching via multiple engines for an object, word, tenor, colour. The images that appear are shaped by what others have searched for before. The lightness of the absent-minded muscle memory of a billion human thumbs searching for the thing flickering through their mind in the moment, the deep cultural anxiety of that, and the density and gravity of the image search as a paradigmatic POV. Some of the Clouds on Chains materials are from Yahoo and Flickr searches 15 years ago; intended and unintended splinters of algorithmic pathways, fragments of the global movement of information in our recent history.

Next, the photoshop-native practice of polygon lassoing and cutting the collected images. The literal chains in Clouds on Chains have been loosened from bikes, chainsaws, chain fences, chain mail, from necks of the famous and anonymous, from online jewellery $3 to $3000. Through this labour, untethering the content from its photographic genesis, releasing it from its background to hover in transparent .png space.

Then, categorising a million images, on digital palettes and in dense libraries stored on a heavy server somewhere.

Searching, seizing, preparing, archiving.

The next steps of Case’s process have taken a 2021 leap. Twin upheavals - the gravity of a global pandemic, and the fizzing exuberance of a nascent way to make, sell and collect art through NFTs – have reacquainted him with digital space and code. The switch to digital space has burst open the scale of his work. At 420 x full scale pieces, Clouds on Chains (and its audience) could not fit in a gallery. Viewing in digital space finally fully empowers the depth and detail of each artwork.

A two-decade creative practice that grew from and with the web has come home.

Case has designed and written the algorithm that now assembles the images, piece by piece, through their categories, tones, and traits. Clouds in crepuscular, high noon, sunrise, and midnight constructions; chains in metal, gold, and platinum; a spectrum of colours. They layer up - arranging, shifting, rescaling, rotating, relating, overlapping, distorting, blurring, fading, contrasting, harmonising, finding their position in the whole. A controlled mix of cloud & chain imagery, shifting coloration, and various backgrounds, balancing on a taut line between intention and surprise.

How are we let into the creation of an artwork? Often art is understood as a solitary practice, the process invisible and guarded, the final outcome admitted only when complete and beneficial to sales. Some technology-led generative art celebrates the process (the code) as the creation itself, that, by being on chain, is implicitly open.

Case’s work overlaps these two social practices of art. His works have been installed, complete, in physical galleries and museums for years, where people viewing them have come up close, noses almost touching the print, trying to imagine the six-month process of how this was made. And now his digital art practice has extended into NFTs, opening new gaps for a community to form around the artist and the work as it develops.

CASE: I went into this intentionally with an attitude of trust and optimism. I asked and listened to the community, and I knew right away that the people I was meeting were the ones building it.

Those people are the smart contract engineers and front-end designers and developers that are essential and recognised partners in NFT projects, plus people who encouraged, guided, collected and connected. The connections build up - searching, relating, layering, contrasting, harmonising, 6-degrees of separation, weak ties, strong ties, overlapping circles, chats, likes, retweets, dense, casual, irreverent, light, algorithmic, global.

Clouds on Chains already bears the fingerprints of the community who will collect it. Clouds, chains, a series numbering 420 x pieces... this is playful, there are little smiles and nods everywhere.

The community scaffold has supported Case’s release of Clouds on Chains as an independent project, revealing (again) the rich possibilities for digital art beyond a traditional gallery model or a traditional-gallery-model-applied-to-NFT-mechanics. The traditional model that has deeply structured the way art is made, viewed and valued, is currently inadequate for this art community and moment. Gatekeeping and scarcity can dampen social and cultural outcomes.

CASE: The infrastructure of the traditional gallery can't hold all the artists to make the community thrive. The art world could learn so much from web3, but hesitancy to do so just reinforces outdated dynamics of collector-dealer-artist.

Decentering away from a platform/gallery and into creative ownership of production, curation, marketing, sales, risk and reward depends on connections and community; it’s the interdependence of independence. In this profound 2021 leap, art practice expands, and artists apply their creativity and labour to the full spectrum of activities, or where they can’t, their peers can, transparently. And, as doesn’t need to be said, the audience has expanded too - outside the gallery to the digital-prime community.

You can’t detach the Clouds on Chains collection from its creative process or from its culture and community, they are woven together, but the result is this:

CASE: A simple idea executed to the max. A programmatic visual tapestry that is provocatively psychological, immersive, explorative.

Stepping away from the process and coming up close to the complete work, nose almost touching (now with a thumb-and-forefinger zoom), dive into the detailed, dense, heavy image that fills and echoes horror vacui, the fear of emptiness. Zoom in again: irreverent details, exuberance, joy, and lightness.

Clouds on Chains by Case Simmons is released December 22nd 2021 at cloudsonchains.xyz

https://cloudsonchains.xyz/

Within design, in their disciplinary lane, architects have all the tools to help make housing more sustainable, healthier, longer-lasting, more usable, more adaptable to changing household needs, and (although I know it is developers not architects who set profit margins and it is The Market that forces the developers’ hand) more affordable. Affordability is not purely a binary calculated by cost of purchase. Long-term affordability is supported locally through housing diversity, where homogeneity limits it.

Architects also have a powerful tool and philosophy of Universal Design. This is the design of places, spaces and products to ensure inclusion, regardless of ability. It is distinct from accessibility standards because inclusion is integrated from the outset. Universal Design is the welcoming address, not the ramp added on the side.

Integrating inclusion is not a tick box exercise. This is where architects of housing-and-ageing move beyond design and into the intentional practice of empathy. Empathy exists on a spectrum from practical (solving a problem) to radical (building equality).

Three types of empathy provide a framework for architects involved in housing-and-ageing:

Them empathy Me empathy Us empathy

*Them *empathy requires that we consider someone with experiences outside of our own by asking: how would this space make someone with [insert cognitive, physical or social difference] feel?  It is an arms-length empathy but gleans immediate results in the built environment, moving from an unthinking and narrow focus on an assumed customer archetype to an expanded base of potential future users. This cognitive empathy builds diversity of user into design decisions. Without it, exclusion underpins the built environment.

Me empathy is emotional, triggering feelings for another person or people. It is the thought of that could be me, and, for a momentary sensation: I feel that is me. Without this deeper empathy, marginalisation of sub-sectors of society is accepted. Empathy for old age is unique because we will all get there – that will be me. The great trick of positive ageing suggests that future experiences of this future self are individually controllable, through self-vigilance, sensible decisions, and investment / insurance (eg. homeownership). Here, empathy is too easily split: that won’t be me! we vow. Melbourne essayist Melanie Joosten locates this split in “an invisible turning point where we stop respecting the old and begin punishing them for existing.” [1] This split empathy individualises risk, and allows blame to be apportioned to others’ choices, enabling a kind of ‘bad faith’ confidence in individual agency.

*Us *empathy moves beyond big ‘me’ feelings for another’s (‘them’) experience of the world. This is empathy beyond the emotional triggers of a particular case or experience that we see or that we conjure in our minds. Us empathy is radical empathy for an unknown and unknowable situation or person, from our future selves to the future whole world.

Because this is empathy for something unknowable, without a target, it moves us to consider consequence, kinship, interdependency, sustainability.

Australian architecture practice Sibling delivered a prescient and practical ongoing research and interactive project in 2018 called New Agency [2]. In framing the project, the practice asked two key questions that help define this bigger and more intentional form of ‘us’ empathy:

How will you grow old? What kind of ancestor do you want to be?

This is empathy for our future selves and for those around us and after us. It is not an emotion, Sibling’s questions challenge a move beyond personal to communal consideration of a more intentional and diverse imaginary of a good old age.

*  *  *

Back to housing. Housing is central to a practical philosophy of old age. It is what scholars Power and Mee [3] call an ‘infrastructure of care’; a physical, psychological, social and economic assemblage that reproduces social difference through its materialities, markets and governance. As housing systems change so too do the possibilities of care. The housing we have ‘patterns’ practices and ideas of care. This includes practices of care as a clinical service (supported by certain physical and financial housing arrangements – requiring ‘them’ empathy). It includes ideas about how we want to live when we get older – what is likely to be important in the fabric of our daily lives (flexing ‘me’ empathy). And, it includes a conception of care as life-long relations and interdependencies, nothing less than the building blocks of society, where decisions exercise empathy for unknown biologically-delinked descendants and environments too.

[1] Joosten, M. (2016). A long time coming: essays on old age, Scribe Publications, Melbourne. p.45

[2] Sibling. New Agency: Rethinking the future of ageing. http://siblingarchitecture.com/projects/new-agency/

[3] Power, E. R. & Mee, K. J. (2020). Housing: an infrastructure of care. Housing Studies, 35(3), pp. 84–505.

Social scientists, economists, geographers, historians, designers (etc) have amassed a weight of concepts for theorising collective understandings of the city. These concepts can anchor the abundant Web 3 project work, and offer pathways for talking about crypto cities ideas in ways that make sense in both blockchain and urban planning language.

Four vectors of city themes that are useful in anchoring crypto cities are:

• city identity

• city lifecycle

• city ownership

• city governance

1. City identity

City identity has historically suffered a problem / saviour complex. On one hand, cities are seen as the world’s dustbin where wicked problems concentrate, dumping grounds for globally conceived and gestated problems [1]. On the other hand, they are laboratories of creation.

Popular social science’s OTT glorification of cities in the 2010s [eg. 2+3] was sparked, in part, by ideas about the strength of weak ties, applying the famous paper [4] to LinkedIn visions of productivity and innovation. Innovation happens, goes the wisdom, because diverse people, ideas and disciplines are brought close together through agglomeration, clustering, collaboration.

Grand city experiments are leading characters in western history. There is the city designed around health (garden cities), around efficiency (modernist cities), around trade and economics (medieval city states, or economic hub cities). Then there are optimistic ideas of the age-friendly city, the child-friendly city, the sustainable city, the creative city, a city for people, smart cities...

These mono-thematic identities are of course all deficient, even if well-meaning, adoptions of the obsession of the moment.

Key takeaway from city theory: pursue multiple overlapping visions.

2. City life-cycle

Cities exist in a perpetual life cycle. Growth, decay, uncertainty, change, replacement, renewal are the daily and decade rhythms of urbanity. It is extraordinary how complex assemblages of materiality, infrastructure, networks and humans can shift, fracture and layer in response to unique local geographies, regional economies and industries, and big global forces such as economic deregulation and migration.

As the world faces the immense global force of the climate crisis, we have to hope that our cities will become more resilient. Sustainability goals and the impacts of climate change are being addressed at the city level around the world - through waste strategies, flood protection, walkability metrics, greening, community infrastructure, and community engagement.

Urban histories evidence simultaneously the city’s solid endurance and liquid delicacy. Cities are antifragile [5] - they tend to get stronger (and more interesting) through their continual friction and change.

Key takeaway from city theory: plan for change not immutability.

3. City ownership

City assets (land, housing, buildings, transport, utilities, community infrastructure) are material, fixed, long-lasting, and expensive. Most are ‘owned’ collectively, albeit through overlapping claims and operation rights by both individuals and global consortia. Individual property ownership is part of a society’s political economy. For example, policy supporting private housing ownership has benefits for the individual, while also generating stability for labour markets, a form of retirement income insurance for state welfare budgets, and macro-economic levers.

An ideology of individualism, personal choice and responsibility, small government and privatisation of services is a substrate of the current era, and this institutionalised individualism standardises relations, transactions and ownership. Overlay here concepts like the right to the city [6], which elevate co-created space, free of commodified ‘pay to play’ expectations. Balancing who pays and who benefits between the individual and the collective is the imperfect and often unequal task of planning.

Key takeaway from city theory: asset ownership is part of the structures of society.

4. City governance

As for determining who decides, this is also the task of planning. The historical culture of planning is rooted in enlightenment ideas that scientific knowledge will provide objective basis for identifying needs and solutions. By the end of the 1960s, researchers came to a different view; negotiation and interpretation were essential dimensions of advocacy and pluralism in planning [7].

A collaborative planning approach [for eg. 8] is the realisation that knowledge and value are not objective but are actively constructed through social and interactive processes. Through collaborative planning, participants build new systems of meaning, new cultures, new organising routines and styles and new social networks (p.285). The challenge is that, although the theory is sound, collaborative planning in practice is hard.

Key takeaway from city theory: successful collaborative decision-making is the city planning holy grail.

*  *  *

While these four themes barely skim the surface of the depth of city theory, the key takeaways (multiple visions, change and resilience, a layered view of ownership, appetite for collaborative planning) can help connect between Web 3 and Trad city planning language to describe goals and mechanisms of decentralisation, networks, transparency, access, accountability, coordination.

City-shaping is slow, risk averse and involves many hands. This is an exceptionally challenging space to seek to imbricate a new paradigm of decentralised and/or autonomous ownership or decision-making. It is also a space that, for the same reasons, could benefit from it.

*  *  *

[1] Zygmunt Bauman, 2007, Liquid Times: Living in and Age of Uncertainty, Polity.

[2] Edward L Glaeser, 2011, Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier, Penguin.

[3] Richard Florida, 2009, Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life, Basic Books.

[4] Mark Granovetter, 1973, ‘The Strength of Weak Ties’, American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 78:4.

[5] Nassim Nicholas Taleb, 2013, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, Penguin.

[6] Originally defined by Henri Lefebvre, 1968, Le Droit à la Ville. Later, discussed by many, including David Harvey, 2003, ’The Right to the City’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Vol. 27:4

[7] Paul Davidoff, 1965, 'Advocacy and pluralism in planning', Journal of the American Institute of Planners, Vol. 31:4.

[8] Patsy Healey, 1997, Collaborative Planning: Shaping Places in Fragmented Societies, Palgrave Macmillan.

Whistle-blower Frances Haugen’s patient explanations of algorithmic devilry allege a Facebook business model that puts fractions of percentage points of profit before community safety [1]. Haugen recognises the real-life consequences of misinformation, having been initially motivated to work at Facebook after her close friend was radicalised on the platform.

As much as misinformation is a problem in English speaking communities, Haugen explains, there are other more extreme concerns for human safety. Facebook subsidises the web in places where a free and open internet does not exist, and only a handful of languages have AI safety ability; programming a new language for safety and integrity does not make economic sense in societies with smaller numbers of (usually) less affluent users. The common knowledge that a lot of what’s on the web is untrue is not necessarily known in all communities. The ethnic violence in Myanmar and Ethiopia, fanned by social media groups, is just the beginning.

Haugen describes how Facebook rhetoric promotes a black and white choice: we can either have oversight or we can have privacy. But this is a false choice. It’s not a problem of dangerous content, it’s a problem of the structures and rules / algorithms of the platform.

Seemingly minor changes that Haugen claims could make a difference in limiting the spread of malicious materials (and reduce clicks / eyeballs / profit by small fractions of percentage points) include:

• refining the algorithms to cap the number of invitations to a group a member can issue (embedding a human scale)

• requiring links to be copied and pasted after a certain number of re-shares (introducing friction to decisions)

• capping the dominance of ‘extreme users’ (those who engage with the platform the most, often in anger and anxiety) in training the algorithm that influences what other users see (introducing a mediating factor)

Notwithstanding Facebook’s recent offensive to claim the metaverse, this is a time for reworking the web. What began as information (Web1) and expanded into interactive content creation (Web2) is in desperate need of governance and civility. Some accountability can be achieved through code-verified decentralisation (Web3), but, even in a world where an individual’s human existence and their online actions and ownership can be proven by a 42-character Ethereum address, the public space of the web remains an under-realised and sad reflection of a community’s values.

Metaphor and analogy have value in helping the collective reworking of the web.

Metaphor and analogy are methods of sense-making – ways of framing and acting in the unknown [2]. The practice of sense-making generates findings useful for others, outside of the case-specific or technical detail. Synthesising the explanation so that it makes sense to others has an intersubjective intention, that is it focuses on the capacity of people to understand each other. Sense-making is the application of discursive and relational techniques of communication; naming, distilling, abstracting and repackaging, including through stories and metaphors, continually redrafting the collective story and the ‘best available’ explanation.

Public space is a useful web analogy.

Eli Pariser is co-director of New Public, a group with a mission to understand what common characteristics make for “public-friendly” spaces, that valorise the collective and that are designed for the greater public good. Much like Haugen, Pariser takes issue with the structure and governance of the web rather than the content. It’s not an information problem, it’s a problem of human relationships, trust, connection, the structures of the bonds that the information flows through. Pariser argues that the way platforms create online spaces should intentionally learn from urban spaces that are optimised for cooperation and connection. Cities are full of strangers interacting, often without danger. Pariser talks about the civic signals – those features that constitute the critical qualities of flourishing public spaces, and that ‘script’ human behaviours, both in real life and online [3]. Civic signals include the scale of public / online spaces, features that script behaviours and connections, the ‘soft’ architecture of programme, and governance, agency and ownership (how and by whom are behaviours set?)

My own job is in urban design. So here are four more urban renewal analogies through which to consider the web space:

1. Place activation

   Curated place activation brings public life to a place in its early evolution, before a critical mass of population ‘activates’ it organically. This includes everyday and night programme, seasonal events, and temporary programme that targets specific user groups within the community. Paid ‘place managers’ have a coordinating role, but the events themselves are decided through stakeholder engagement (within the community) and through expressions of interest by external partners. To accommodate this range the structure of public spaces should be simple and flexible rather than complex. For web, this analogy illuminates the role of planned activation rather than simply letting the space fill organically, especially in the early days of a platform / group / protocol.

2. Funding

   In urban renewal, those who benefit from the uplift in land value contribute financially to the upgrades required to support the growing population. For example, a residential tower development will pay a fee per apartment as a contribution to funding needed community infrastructure - parks, public spaces, street upgrades. For web, this analogy questions the mechanisms for contributing to and determining infrastructure priorities as a platform grows.

3. Safety, diversity, inclusion

   Universal Design is the design of places and products to ensure inclusion, regardless of ability. It is distinct from accessibility because inclusion is integrated from the outset. Universal Design is the welcoming address, not the ramp added on the side. Other measures of safety and inclusion in physical public spaces are the social field (a scale at which people can see other people - increasing perception of safety) and walkability (describing - obviously - distance plus environmental comfort). For web, these features can be analogies to consider details of scale, access, user experience that support expression and connection and limit danger.

4. Long term view

   Finally, there is the factor of time. Improving public space and safety is not wholesale reworking but long-term and incremental renewal by many hands that takes time. It’s an ongoing job, not something that can be fixed once, rebuilt, and then disregarded, it won’t ever be complete or perfect. But, as Haugen says, we shouldn’t be afraid of trying to make a problem 80% better just because we can’t make it 100% better.

[1] Frances Haugen, 2021,  https://www.franceshaugen.com/blog/b9xlswihkike7639nn4ie23odz9eqy

[2] Deborah Ancona, 2012, Sensemaking: Framing and acting in the unknown, in The handbook for teaching leadership: Knowing, doing, and being, Sage

[3] New Public, 2021, Civic Signals: The qualities of flourishing digital spaces,  https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1lO4skPVekwciJGFYxxJBIBitFzzDSC0zL1-AvhgfeNs/edit#slide=id.gaae01eb308_1_81

Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott (1998) opens with the story of the invention of scientific forestry in 18th Century Prussia and Saxony. This is a model and a metaphor for the simplification and manipulation of the world by powerful institutions with sharply defined interests (such as nation states). In the case of forestry, the state’s tunnel vision is focused on resource extraction, translating the ancient forest into measurements of usable timber yield, and missing the other parts of the forest. Then, reshaping (clearing, ordering, replanting) forests to better suit measurement, administration and extraction of that resource. The ordered rows of single-species trees were, of course, catastrophic for the ecosystem.

Top-down planning maps the world according to myopic short term interests. In Scott’s thesis this is the substrate to the tragic episodes of state development through the 20th Century, which combined the aspiration to the administrative ordering of nature and society, the use of power, and a weakened civil society lacking the capacity to resist.

It’s one of those non-fiction books where the author makes their claim and then delivers a regiment of chaptered illustrations in support. (Whisper: This could have been an email). I read it because it’s on the reading lists of many in the DAO community, and I’ve been doing a DAO course.

The world needs more larpers writing about DAOs like it needs a hole in the head. Except, such is the global network that the seeming cornucopia of discord servers bursting with DAO discourse represents people and ideas that are still in reality few and siloed.

A Distributed Autonomous Organisation (DAO) is decentralised and governed around rules enforced on a blockchain. The rules and the organisation are therefore transparent and immutable, open source and trustless.

Aaron Wright

@awrigh01

Blockchains replace kings and centralized leaders with code.

DAOs replace boards and executives with code.

Free yourself from kings. Choose code.

247

8:27 AM • Oct 27, 2021

The DAO literature (eg. seminal essay A Prehistory of DAOs by Kei Kreutler) positions a sequence of old governance organisational structures, from tribes to hierarchies to markets, and locates DAOs (and coordinated decentralised decision-making more generally) next to and ripe for a global, post-corporate world.

DAOs have been described as a discord with a shared bank account. The majority are organised groups investing in digital assets. There was $10m in DAOs in 2019, and over $1B now. Beyond digital currency wealth, members talk a lot about how they value the community of a DAO.

Seeing Like a State is a DAO reading list favourite because it describes repeating failures of centralised top-down organisations and by default seems to welcome the DAO fundamentals of decentralisation, transparency and coordination in decision-making, work, and reward.

But, by another reading of the text, it is the language and methods of measurement that have so effectively shaped the actions and outcomes Scott describes. Decentralised Autonomous Organisations do the same; instead of the metrics of natural resources the language is rules that a machine can understand.

There is a schism between the language of DAOs and the language of the DAOists. Articulate, genius DAOist trailblazers carry me along on their belief that a better way of coordinating is possible and it’s here.

Kev.Ξth, GG24 is live💰✨

@owocki

Don’t ever let a cynic convince you a better world is not possible.

What we think we become

141

3:02 PM • Oct 12, 2021

Kevin Owocki of Github DAO spoke to my class, beautifully, astutely, fluidly. At one point he paused and reminded us: Well, you know, there are a lot of other aspects grafted onto employment structures we need to consider, security, sick leave and health insurance, pension systems, unions. The old system has some benefits.

The old system does have some benefits, although not for the globally connected 20-40 year old males who currently constitute the majority of the DAO community. We talk about this, too, the problem of diversity, the risk of a narrow group of people building the same infrastructure, following the same best practice applied across the board, with the same assumptions, the same solution to the same reading of the problem.

Even fluidly articulate Owocki shapes his compelling vision around the language of the technology that underpins it. Around tools, plug-ins, applications, perpetual rules that can’t be compromised, the ‘if then…’ clarity of the coder’s direction, the ability to fix scalability and coordination problems with clever technology.

Kev.Ξth, GG24 is live💰✨

@owocki

What are the best tools/best practices for cultivating *culture* in DAOs?

64

12:08 PM • Oct 13, 2021

DAOs will continue to grow and evolve out of their early experimental phases and into more mainstream adoption in coordinating groups with common aims and shared resources. Right now, rules guide the actions of setting up a DAO and programming it (through an absolute launch of beta tools) to accept member proposals, enable member votes, allocate funds, distribute shares, measure workload and contribution, track sentiment, manage communications, set up admission protocols, cultivate *culture*. Rules so specific they can be interpreted by a machine, trying to play catch up to the ideas.

My attempt to use (obey?) a discord bot to set up token distribution to digital wallets feels like moving too fast through a dark cave and then it feels like failure.

The DAO course was terrific, by the way, the best 20 HAUS tokens I have ever spent.

Some people have issues with DAOs because of their cypto-currency adjacency, because (currently) their primary use is to fuel group speculation on digital assets and (ideally) generate monthly salaries in hours for their members. To the extent that they solve problems, they’re mostly solving the problem that crypto created for itself. That will run its course and the philosophy and systems of decentralisation will morph as other goals find purpose and function within them. But now, at the beginning of the structuring of this system/s, we are talking about social benefits in a small echo chamber through the rigid language of code.

I told my boss at work about DAOs, but he hadn’t heard of a blockchain and the string between TradFi and DeFi was stretched too far. He said: I hope they remember all of us old fashioned people in this future. I agree, please don’t leave me behind, but on the other hand, TradFi never worried about those it excluded either.