Synthesis Alter-Eco Seminar (5 April 2022)
TheSphere
A new organizational form, a research-creation project experimenting with Web 3.0 technology to explore new ecologies of funding for the performing arts
Erik Bordeleau (Lisbon)
(Alter-Eco)
The Sphere challenges the traditional frameworks of cultural production. Our goal is to redistribute the risks and opportunities of making art by facilitating the involvement of audiences and other potential stakeholders at different stages of the curation and creative process. The Sphere is about new ways of being creative together, making the success of one performance a catalyst for the whole art community.
How do we undo business as usual? How do we generate new ecologies of funding, in the arts and beyond, enabling new ways of coming together in order to answer the tremendous challenges of the Anthropocene which await us? In order to turn the world into a swarm of living commons rather than self-abstracting, debased corporate entities, we need to engage further into how monetary systems, financial apparatuses and business models actually work. We need to design otherwise types of feedback loops, and imagine other modes of capture that escape the tight grip of reductive economic abstractions and anti-social storing of value. That is: We need to make our economies weird again.
