The DAOWO Global Initiative Network

In February 2020, cultural practitioners and representatives of non-profit arts and technology organisations from around the world gathered to participate in the Artworld DAO Think Tank – A 52hr Gathering. Ruth Catlow and Penny Rafferty facilitated a programme hosted by Goethe Institute London to discuss, analyse and map the obstacles, opportunities, and implications for progressive, decentralised artworld automation.

This intense learning session and retreat allowed cultural community activists to host their own events in their localities and organisations and prototype a DAO. Participants dissected the “old artworld” and drew on the emerging blockchain arts space to prototype DAOs as art and for art, to increase solidarity, strangeness, and freedom to take collective action – to create new arts ecologies. A jury of experts awarded funding to prototypes for progressive art DAOs and artworld DAOs to five successful teams.

The DAOWO Global Initiative forges a transnational network of arts and blockchain cooperation with leading international arts and technology institutions and communities in cities around the world.

Our ambition is to seed a new decentralised ecology of open source cultural organisations, built by artists embedded in distributed global communities. Designed to activate collaboration across communities, disciplines and sectors, DAOWO (Decentralised Autonomous Organisation With Others) events enable participants to interrogate the benefits and pitfalls of blockchain developments for arts, culture and wider society from local perspectives. Events connect visionary artists, cultural workers and blockchain entrepreneurs, together with local initiatives, communities, institutions and businesses to seek new transnational systems and approaches.

Announcing The DAOWO Sessions: Artworld Prototypes 2021

Meet the teams creating 5 Artworld DAO prototypes in Berlin, Hong Kong, Johannesburg and Minsk in a series of showcase and discussion events hosted online by Penny and Rafferty and Ruth Catlow through January and February 2021.

Read more about the Artworld DAO prototypes and teams here.

The DAOWO Global Initiative is a partnership between Goethe-Institut, Furtherfield@DECAL and Serpentine Galleries.