Radical Friends: Decentralised Autonomous Organisations and the Arts

Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) offer unique tools for translocal peers to encode rules, relations and values into their joint ventures using blockchain technology. This new book, edited by Ruth Catlow and Penny Rafferty, who have been at the forefront of investigations into the relationship between DAOs and the arts, constitutes over 5 years of research with essays, interviews, exercises and prototypes from leading thinkers, artists and technologists across this emerging field. In recent years DAOs have been heralded as a powerful stimulus for experimentation to reshape new cultural value systems for interdependence, cooperation, and care. At a time when the mainstream artworld is focused on NFTs, this book refocuses attention toward DAOs as potentially the most radical blockchain technology for the arts, in the long term. Contributors engage with both past and emergent methodologies for building resilient and mutable systems for scale-free mutual aid. Collectively, the book aims to evoke and conjure new imaginative communities, and to share the practices and blueprints for the vehicles to get there. Contributors: Ramon Amaro, Calum Bowden, Jaya Klara Brekke, Mitchell F. Chan, Cade Diehm, eeefff, Carina Erdmann, Primavera De Filippi, Charlotte Frost, Max Hampshire, Lucile Olympe Haute, Sara Heitlinger, Lara Houston, Cadence Kinsey, Nick Koppenhagen, Kei Kreutler, Laura Lotti, Jonas Lund, Massimiliano Mollona, MetaObjects, Rhea Myers, Omsk Social Club, Bhavisha Panchia, Legacy Russell, Tina Rivers Ryan, Nathan Schneider, Sam Skinner, Sam Spike, Hito Steyerl, Alex S. Taylor, Cassie Thornton, Suzanne Treister, Stacco Troncoso, Ann Marie Utratel, Samson Young.