Decentralised autonomous organisations (more commonly referred to as DAOs) are online communities that use distributed ledger technologies to create public, automated, and distributed voting systems. Research suggests that DAOs hold affordances that could have transformative effects on decentralised governance (Brekke et al., 2021). This is particularly salient for the arts where DAOs have been experimented with to explore horizontal approaches to artmaking, funding, and curating. However, while there is growing literature on DAOs as a governing tool, there is little research that explores the lived experiences of DAO members.
This project will respond to this growth in DAO arts governance by investigating the rhetoric behind DAOs in relation to the lived experiences of engaging with them. In doing so, the project aims to contribute to discussions on the socio-imaginaries of DAOs on future of organisation, by documenting the views of those who engage with the technology and the barriers they encounter in doing so.
The aim of the project is to better understand the rhetoric behind what DAOs are claimed to offer versus what they actually provide for digital arts participation. This, in turn, will reveal the barriers to DAO participation and offer insights into supporting more equitable digital participation. Digital art participation refers to practices that support shared curatorial and/or creative authority between artists, audiences, and organisations. DAOs are online communities that use distributed ledger technologies to replicate cooperative-like digital infrastructures that are increasingly being experimented with in the arts sector to support horizontal governing approaches to artmaking, funding, and curating.
This research will employ a case study approach to analyse the Friends of HEK DAO, an online community organised by the House of Electronic Arts, Basel. Friends of HEK offers a unique and highly relevant case study as it a digitalised membership scheme which aims to represent a ‘new era of inclusivity’. It uses common platforms for DAO communities, including Discord and Snapshot, while also providing onboarding processes that supports users who are unfamiliar with the technology. The project will use digital ethnographic methods to investigate the lived experiences of Friends of HEK members, to understand the value they derive from participation, the barriers they encounter, and how these barriers influence engagement. In doing so, the project aims to build a detailed case study that will not only contribute to the ongoing discourse on the use of technologies in fostering digital cultural participation, but also critically examine the challenges, risks, and barriers associated with using them.
Outputs
Team
Frances Liddell – Post-Doctoral Research Associate, University of Edinburgh
House of Electronic Arts (HEK) – Basel, Switzerland