Refraction advocates for the transformative power of art to shape and rejuvenate culture. As the world grapples with a rising authenticity crisis, there's an urgent call to connect, support, and champion the voices of independent artists. Preserving human connections and values is now more crucial than ever.

As we close in on 2 years as a DAO, let’s reflect on what we’ve accomplished together, and illuminate a potential path to fulfill the promise of a new internet, towards a more equitable and creative world.

How We Started

In November 2021 we published our Hello World! Mirror post, anchored in the grassroots movements that fueled underground culture and inspired by new tools and new modes of organization. This marked the beginning of our quest to reimagine and rebuild a cultural industry that has often let down artists and creators, aspiring to construct a world where power is distributed with greater equity.

Our shared mission brought people together from different disciplines and stages of their artistic career — from emerging artists in Brazil, to rave punks in Malaysia, to the vibrant Moroccan digital art community, and iconic music and art spaces of NYC — uniting under a common vision to co-create and co-own a decentralized creative community. An artist-run movement that — like so many that came before it — formed a space to amplify vital independent voices.

We realized quickly that for real change to happen, we needed to build tangible examples of the future we believe in — to move beyond theory and into real life. What began as an experiment in decentralized curation and community has grown into a passionate global family of over 1500 artists, producers, musicians, DJs, promoters, club owners, collectors, cultural operators and fans.

Here’s a quick look at what we’ve managed to accomplish together.

▹ 27 International Events

▹ +30 Grant Projects Funded

▹ 700+ Artists Members

▹ 2500+ NFTs Minted

▹ 10,000+ Attendees

▹ Over $500K Back to Artists

In reflection, we also want to look to the future, with a clear vision on how we operate as a DAO, how we create greater on-chain alliances and coalitions, how we incubate new ideas, and grow creative web3 as a whole, for the future that our community wants to see.

In web3, nothing works in silos, and nothing is perfect. We’ve learned a lot from our team, our community and artists and continue to adapt, change and learn. We know the road to a truly equitable culture space is long, with many twists and turns, but we are steadfast in our goal. We continue to partner with different organizations across web2 and web3 to carry out our programming, increase our membership, and further our curatorial mandate worldwide — collecting everything in a unified online cultural space — an artist-led platform debuting in 2024. By gathering the multiplicity of works, projects, art and initiatives, it begins to create a cohesive vision of how a worldwide curatorial initiative really can work.

Join us as we continue our journey.

How To Join

The best way to ensure Refraction’s ongoing mission is to purchase a Refract Pass.

As a Refract Pass holder you’re helping a growing community of artists, and cultural operators explore new modes of expression through groundbreaking work and special projects.

Our Pass holders get exclusive access to the best curation and experiences.

• Exclusive airdrops of art from our founding artists including upcoming work from Sasha Stiles, Rick Silva, Nicolas Sassoon and more - only available to Refract Pass holders.

• Full access to all of our global events, workshops and community gatherings including our annual tentpole events at Miami Art Basel, EthDenver, NFTNYC, ETHCC and more.

• Each Refract Pass is a unique artwork created from our DAO-led generative art tool (currently in alpha).

• In 2024 we will be increasing our community engagement through monthly townhalls, regular artist talks, more grant programs, special workshops and creative projects.

• Refract Passes are limited to 1,537 and are over ⅔ sold out.

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About Refraction

Refraction is an artist-owned community leading the next wave of digital art, music and culture — online, onchain and IRL. The organization champions digital arts and culture, through curated experiences of art, performance, and new and evolving technology (blockchain, ai, etc…) sharing global creativity and empowering diverse artists with new tools for sustainability and creativity.

Through our latest funding snapshot for Season 02 and 03, RefractionDAO will continue our ongoing programming, collections, and commissions through our curatorial team, while also opening up a Creative Grants program through a worldwide open call.

"A major learning from Seasons 00 and 01 is that Refraction is a purpose-based DAO, with a clear focus on our artists, events, and programming across our extended community.

Extensive projects developed in Seasons 00 and 01 will be released during the next two seasons. The team has been busy working on a Metaverse performance and exhibition space, as well as an editorial platform, that will feature writing, radio, NFT drops, and DAO-based content. Our editorial theme for Season 02 will be "minted chaos", reflecting the reality of the rapidly-evolving space that we all live in. Season 03 will culminate with our most extensive initiative to date, a two-day festival during Art Basel Miami / Miami Art Week.

Our core contributors have also cultivated the The Creative Grants program, which we believe will continue to grow our artist-run community.

Creative Grants will recognize areas including events, editorial, curatorial programs, radio, exhibitions, metaverse, discourse, artwork, drops, and other proposals relative to the DAOs Mission and Programming.

We will be developing a Creative Grants template / FAQ  so that applicants can best put together relevant proposals for each area.

Throughout our first two seasons, we have learned so much from our community, artists, and partners about what is important for Refraction. Through the next two, we look forward to seeing what ideas and concepts emerge as we expand even further.

Refraction’s Season 0 has come to a close and we’re now moving as a collective into Season 01. The ability to progress and move forward as a DAO is a direct result of the  success of our Season 0 NFT drop. Incorporating the works of eight digital artists of the highest caliber, we were able to design a bespoke pass and generate unique access to our community, with a view towards future utility. This NFT bundle, which also included all seven works from the artists, comes with a set of utilities that give holders new ways to experience the artist-run IRL<>URL world we are creating. Holders may now access all Refraction Events throughout the rest of Season 0 and 01, plus all areas of the Refraction Platform (currently being built out). They also have an automatic spot on greenlists for all upcoming Refraction NFT drops.

We’re incredibly grateful to Dina Chang and Tim Saccenti (Setta Studio), Claire Silver, Ellie Pritts, p1xelfool, Yoshi Sodeoka, Cibelle Cavalli Bastos, and Linda Dounia. Without the help of these artists from across the globe, this drop and the completion of Refraction Season 0 would not have been possible. A massive shout also goes out to all of the community — which now extends to over 800 artists, collectors, curators, and team members, as well as those who minted the NFT.

Events

Beginning in Brooklyn with our Carnegie Hall Afrofuturism Festival collaboration, Refraction has hosted a series of sold-out events that serve as a way to commune with members of the DAO, onboard people to Web3, and bring back that live music experience we’ve sorely missed over the last two years. Combining our carefully curated approach to visual arts and electronic music, our live events in New York City, Toronto, Vancouver and Berlin have made it clear that people are looking to experience something considered, curated and elevated, and want to engage with culture in new ways.

The Season 0 NFT funding allowed us to expand our vision of what these events could accomplish, inviting artists, practitioners and audience members to attend Refraction events worldwide for free and creating a more accessible web3 experience for those who are new to this nebulous space that is, arguably, still in its infancy. It has also made it possible for those who might not be able to afford the barrier to entry find an inclusive and supportive home.

Part of building this global home includes securing a number of IRL spaces internationally, which Refraction will use for events throughout Season 01 and 02.  There will be more details to come, but for the moment we can tell you that those spaces include Zero Space in New York, for NFT NYC, and The Center for Subtropical Affairs during Art Basel Miami.

Funding Organizations

With the revenue earned from the drop, we were able to help fund three amazing organizations — Cyberbaat, Magma DAO and Pixie DAO ― to support emerging artists worldwide. All three of these DAOs align with our principles in that they are run by artists, for artists. Over $30, 000 USD was allocated to help them build out their own programming, which includes acquiring new works through paid commissions, curated by the DAOs, hiring a developer to build websites to promote the artists, DAOs and work.

In Cyberbaat’s case, this means they can host front-facing auctions focused on African art. The funding will also help cover mint fees for emerging artists, and create a fund for a physical exhibition in Brazil for Magma DAO.

It’s important to us that we recognize the current crisis in the Ukraine, so part of this funding went toward aiding Ukraine DAO and Black Foreigners in Ukraine.

Collections and Commissions

We’ve expanded the Refraction collection, through the acquisition of existing, new and commission-funded works from artists around the world. We’re also proud to say that the artists from whom we collected are now a part of the DAO.

Carbon-Negative Drop

In partnership with Eco Labs DAO, Refraction was able to facilitate a completely eco-negative drop. The Eco Labs Impact Portfolio attempts to reach a balance between the many tradeoffs in qualifying impact on reversing climate change. Cost, Risk, Permanence, Verifiability, Trust & Reputation, & Scalability are some of the tradeoffs the DAO looks at when compiling a portfolio.

NCT, or ‘Nature Carbon Token’, are traditional carbon offsets that have been tokenized using Toucan Protocol. Their meta-registry is currently associated with the Polygon network.

NRT, aka ‘Nori Removal Token’ at Nori Carbon Removal Marketplace, can be used to purchase carbon removal certificates. This differs from carbon offsets, where the impact is quantified using both mitigation and removal (for example, paying a logging company NOT to cut down a forest could yield carbon offsets). Nori is only doing removal, primarily using regenerative farming practices to capture soil-based carbon.

EcoCredits go beyond carbon, and look at co-benefits such as ecosystem restoration or biodiversity protection, and are sourced from Regen Network. We're still in the early days of EcoCredits, but new methodologies are being created to quantify and qualify different forms of impact that go beyond just the carbon element.

DACC stands for “Direct Air Carbon Capture”. This is a very expensive form of carbon removal, but can be highly permanent, and is very easily measured, utilizing Climeworks.

Refraction Platform

We are currently building our very own platform, which will serve as a multi-purpose creative hub. On it, we’ll launch ongoing NFT projects from Refraction members, and have a publication where writers and journalists will be able to produce editorial content not only on the work we’re creating within the DAO, but also expand ideas in our areas of interest — including digital arts, music, the blockchain, Web3 and the history of subcultures. Finally, this platform will be the home of Refraction Radio, which will act as a resource for information around our events, plus a home for mixes, DJ sets, talk programming and more.

Creation of our Metaverse Space

Working with a team of innovative designers, we are beginning to create our Metaverse virtual venue in Mona. The venue will house several different spaces, including a main hall for live performances and gallery exhibitions, a basement club in an underground location for club programming and DJ sets, a listening bar/record shop for socializing, listening to curated playlists from Refraction artists, and look through our collection of music NFTs, and finally, an outdoor area that leans toward ambient and experimental sounds.

Once again, we’d like to extend a heartfelt thank you to every member of our community — your feedback and support has given us the tools to continue building Refraction into a self-sustaining, decentralized and artist-helmed platform. We are continuing to innovate throughout Season 01. There are so many exciting things in the pipeline, and we can’t wait to share them with you.

Our mission is to raise voices of both emerging and established artists that speak to Refraction’s greater ethos and goals. At the forefront is our broad network of artists, creatives, activists, partners, and industry leaders who embrace the beliefs articulated in our Mirror posts, Manifesto, and DAO membership principles.

RefractionDAO is a decentralized global creative community. We are focused on moving culture forward through collectively reimagining live experiences, installations, and the visual arts in the physical world and open metaverse. Our foundational tenets are to redistribute economic upside back to creators, enable collective ownership, and foster new models of organization. Diversity is core to our ethos with programming that will always reflect this.

Programming Overview - Refraction Festival and Ongoing Events.

RefractionDAO’s hybrid model for curation and presentation encompasses IRL events around the world that are mirrored online and, in turn, archived. Our global partners work with the DAO to curate and present these works. It is essential that the local community is meaningfully involved in the decision-making for any specific region. This year’s festival will take place in 12 cities across the globe. Performances, installations, and music sets will be recorded and culminate in a two-day long festival in the Open Metaverse. This will act as a flagship for Refraction, with further events, installations, drops, and programming to come. The DAO’s long-term goal is to establish a large-scale IRL festival that brings the web3 community together from around the globe.

Ongoing Drops and Initiatives

We will create ongoing drops and initiatives that will occur year-round. They will reflect the different practices represented in the community as a creative starting point. We will also foster DAO-to-DAO initiatives, partner projects, and special charity drops that support collectively representative causes.

The DAO will also participate in the following long-term initiatives:

• Residencies, mentorships, and new works

• Creation and production of visual + music NFTs

• Live event installations, immersive environments, and new concepts in live performance visuals and interaction

• Collection, exhibition curation, and vault

• Archiving, presentation formats, and conditions

• Media archive and repository

• Music and visual mixes

• Artist-run charitable drops benefiting mission-aligned causes

• Ongoing events

• Spaces worldwide

• Writing and literary projects

• Touring and further elements such as management

• DAO-to-DAO curatorial initiatives

• Agency and management

• Sponsorship and marketing division focused on artist-led projects worldwide

Curating as Artists, Community and Beyond

Different principles represent our multifaceted mandate, which acknowledges both historical and emergent forms of curation.

Curator as Curator - We believe this historical model, as utilized by galleries, museums, and artist-run centers, to be important to both the history of art curation and its future.

Artists as Curators - Community artists conceptualizing concepts, recommending artists, and building initiatives.

Curator as Producer - Actively producing the work, often assuming a Creative Producer role in the process.

Curator as Activist - Curation as it can play a formative role in activism, both social, political and further.

Curator as Network - Managing networks and collaborative projects that build cultures together.

Curator as Writer - Developing text-based projects and expanding the potential of the written word.

Curator as Collector - Building out the Refraction collection of commissioned, donated, and collected works as part of the community’s mandate led by the Curatorial and Art Guilds.

Curator as Software - Pushing the boundaries of what can be conceived of and created on-chain through generative art, creative coding, machine learning, and beyond.

Curation as Web3 - Curating on the blockchain and deploying other projects across the technology and culture of web3

Emergence within Curation

In the spirit of web3, emergent concepts from the community will become new curatorial pathways within the larger festival. Working examples have already come to light in our Health and Wellness, Creative Technology, and DAO-to-DAO guilds. We will continue to build upon these nascent ideas within our larger curatorial framework.

We also acknowledge the evolving curatorial landscape in the emergence of new art forms, modes of media, and presentation models.

We would like to thank the following founding artists, curators, and partners for their input into Refraction’s curatorial process. This is a living document and we welcome feedback.

ANDY ROLFES, ANA CABALLERO, CIBELLE CAVALLI BASTOS, CLAIRE SILVER, DINA CHANG, ELLIE PRITTS, GABRIELLE MIC, GENKI NISHIDA, GREG LIBURD, HEIKO HOFFMANN, IKARO CAVALCANTE, KAITLYN DAVIES, LINDA DOUNIA, LORNA MILLS, 

MALCOLM LEVY, MANAMI SAKAMOTO, MICHAIL STANGL, MUTEK, NATE BOYCE, NFT CULTURE PROOF, NICOLAS SASSOON, NYEGE NYEGE, P1XELFOOL, PAULINE LM, PHILIP D STEARNS, RAFAEL KATIGBAK, ROBERT GALLARDO, SASHA STILES, SUREN SENEVIRATNE, STANDARD TIME, STUD1NT.

Refraction’s first project is NFT Culture Proof, a collaboration with Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern. They use this historical moment to have us literally write, and re-write, a web3-native framework for storytelling and discourse. It’s an ideal launching point of collaboration for our DAO and Refraction Festival.

NFT Culture Proof is a landmark large-scale collaborative project that actively explores the expansive potential for the Blockchain as a medium of performance. For 32 days, participants contribute to a stream of live but immutable on-chain text, producing crypto-native SVG snapshots of collective dialog and storytelling.

Inspired by the practice of daily participation explored in On Kawara's Date Paintings, it also builds on pioneering text-based Blockchain projects - referencing the storytelling and collaboration of Loot, on-chain text generated NFT images of Token Equals Text, code-based on-chain generated NFTs of Art Blocks, and collective writing and image-based art of Untitled Frontier.

The project speaks to where Refraction sees the possibilities of Web3, from democratized platforms to collaborative writing and art projects, to concepts that not only excite, but also give space for reflection, discourse, emergent ideas, and experiments. NFT Culture Proof invites the audience into a pseudonymous digital dialogue that plays in the space between the improvised immediacy of digital transmission and the immutability of the decentralized block chain, sparked by some of our favourite crypto galaxy brains.

How it Works

Beginning on November 11, 9AM PST, contributors can submit their text-blocks, each building on the one before. Daily “writing prompts” from artists, thinkers, and authors spanning the crypto-verse will focus, inspire and provoke group contribution. Confirmed participants so far include @thesarahshow, @simondlr, @rheaplex, @_deafbeef, @sashastiles, @KalenIwamoto, @1nterdependence (Mat Dryhurst and Holly Herndon), @mal_levy, @MezBreezeDesign, @sterlingcrispin, @annespalter, @CaballeroAnaMa, @kzathe, @isthisanart, @katecursed, @kaigani, @ClaireSilver12, @artnome, @TRANSFERgallery (Kelani Nichole and Wade Wallerstein), @p1xelfool @ReginaHarsanyi, @pridesai, @aGENDAdao, @jpg, @dhof, @shumonbasar, @cibellecibelle, @FWBtweets, @gabriellemic.

Every text-block submitted will generate a unique NFT, which also lives completely on-chain as a crypto-native SVG. These are generated in real-time, and include the date, participation day (out of 32), edition number, and the participant's submitted text (up to 128 characters), as well as the seven preceding lines - to encourage ongoing collaboration. There will be 256 text blocks available for purchase on day one, with 256 more added each day. Every time a text-block is purchased, a previous participant will receive a second one. This ongoing airdrop is designed to facilitate continued and spirited community-oriented dialog. It also adds a random chance element to further collaborate and receive more NFTs for free!

We refer to our NFTs as Cultures*: they are your proof of participation, proof of collective performance, proof of ownership, and proof of culture.*

-NFT Culture Proof

Why RefractionDAO is Down

We've been continual fans and long-time collaborators with NFT Culture Proof creators and new media artists Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern, since their breakthrough "collaborative online intervention", Wikipedia Art. What began as a request to participate as prompt writers grew into a partnership. When we learned more about their intentions to build community on the chain itself, it became clear that our shared values and beliefs in collective creation and distributed prosperity meant that we needed to involve NFT Culture Proof in RefractionDAO on a deeper level.

RefractionDAO is a group of artists, curators, technicians, and fans focused on moving the culture forward through collectively reimagining live experiences. We believe NFT Culture Proof will become a genesis framework for collaborative web3 performance and predict a Cambrian explosion of exciting derivative projects from our decentralized global creative community and beyond.

We hope for NFT Culture Proof to both capture - and push at the boundaries of - what collective creativity and distributed value might look like, be, and do. It is a seriously playful and playfully serious experiment, where today’s frivolity and work, hopes and ideas, are permanently inscribed - and tomorrow’s possibilities are just emerging.

- NS and SK

Join us in making history, and building a new future. http://nftculture.art/

The history of underground music and art is the story of community, resistance and resourcefulness. From the predominantly LGBTQ+, African American, and Latinx communities that propelled the Chicago house and New York disco/garage movements, to the defiant introspective aggression of DC hardcore, the mechanistic afrofuturism of Detroit techno, and the four pillars of Hip Hop — each were fuelled by people interconnected through shared beliefs, identity, and a vision of what should be.

Simultaneously across the globe similar youth movements found a voice — equal parts camaraderie, expression, and rejection of the status quo.

Similar to early web and media art pioneers, at the forefront of these cultural movements was a network of artists, activists and visionaries who gathered in obscurity on the fringes of society. But what they lacked in institutional support, mass approval and accolades, they made up for in ingenuity, originality and a fiercely independent counterculture mentality. In this bubble, these artist-run movements were free to develop their own style, sounds, and visions of the future that had never been seen before — but ones that would indelibly change culture as we know it.

What Happened

Over the last 35 years the ability for these creative networks to flourish has been stifled. Merging media conglomerates increased concentration of ownership, allowing more power and control over artists and their work, flooding their verticalized media ecosystems with promotion of a few hand picked megastars, and charging everyone else a premium to reach fans.

Live music, once the last hope for independent artists to eke out a living, didn’t escape corporate oligarchy — concert promotion, ticketing, venues, and advertising were increasingly controlled by a single entity, and the ability for artists to control their own destiny continues to erode. In the art world, a few elite gatekeepers have controlled the large amount of means of production, access to collectors, and dissemination of the work. This cross cultural homogeneity means less opportunity for diversity, spontaneity and inventiveness. NFTs have ushered in a potential new era of artist prosperity, but that solves only part of the problem. How can we rebuild an entire creative industry free from the hierarchical trappings of centralized thinking?

Enter RefractionDAO

RefractionDAO’s goal is to become a decentralized global creative community of artists, curators and fans focused on moving culture forward through collectively reimagining live experiences in the physical world and in the open metaverse. Our mission is to equitably redistribute the upside back to creators while enabling collective ownership, and fostering new models of organization.

Diversity is central to our core ethos with BIPOC and LGBTQ+ communities being the focus of our founding membership, residencies, and intended mentorship programs. We’ve also mandated charitable participation as a requisite for every initiative.

Our cornerstone is Refraction Festival, a month-long fully on-chain IRL<->URL project featuring musical performances and art installations in over 10 cities across five continents available globally through the open metaverse. As an artistic node for Web3 projects born from the community, RefractionDAO will not only organize the festival but collectively manage: ongoing projects and commissions.

Modern underground movements have always been artist curated and run, and we believe that returning power back to creators will have a positive impact on culture and society at large.

A Global Festival DAO

In 2020, Refraction's inaugural celebration of electronic music, visual art, and internet culture attracted over 500,000 virtual attendees. Our model this year is hybrid, taking place across the internet and in physical spaces. In the coming months there will be an open call for audiovisual artists, experiments in format, and experiential activations leading up to the festival itself, which kicks off on the March equinox 2022.

All participating artists will receive founding $REFRACT tokens and share in proceeds from the Festival’s NFT sales. Collectors will be able to donate works for consideration as part of our vault. Token holders - whether artists, curators, or audiences - can take on unique roles within the DAO and help evolve the community over time.

Founding Partners

Our initial partners represent artists, festivals, spaces, DAOs, and beyond. Included in this group are Nyege Nyege (Kampala), MUTEK (Montreal), Public Records (NYC), AWE (Joshua Tree), Standard Time (Toronto), FWB (Open Metaverse), Contact (Tokyo), Sao Paulo Artist CO (Sao Paulo), Zora (Berlin), MUSE0 and Agrippa DAO (Open Metaverse).

What’s next?

Shifting the paradigm towards an equitable, fully artist-run system is not a straight path. We embrace the collective fluidity of emergent thinking, and in the weeks to come Refraction will begin building our squad. We’re looking to assemble a passionate cohort of musical and visual artists, digital designers, developers, event producers, metaverse specialists, writers, installation artists, and anyone interested in applying their skills to help bridge physical and digital experiences. We see RefractionDAO as a continuation of the DIY history of networked creativity, but superpowered by new tools made possible through Web3, and fuelled by people interconnected through shared beliefs, identity, and a vision of what should be.

Be part of the journey:

https://discord.gg/aVKbh7yeQn

https://twitter.com/RefractionDAO