Institute of Arts & Culture at the Department of Decentralisation

# **Proposal: Assembly of the Possible | Institute of Arts and Culture for the Web3 Ecosystem**

To: Ethereum Foundation
From: Olga Kohut ([JOY Collective e.V](https://www.joyspace.berlin/).), Jacob Huehn ([MOOS](https://www.moos.space/)), [Crosslucid](https:/https://crosslucid.zone/), Stina Gustaffsson (Department of Decentralisation)
Subject: Cultural Infrastructure for the Decentralised Era: A Proposal for the Institute of Arts and Culture
Date: 29.06.2025

**Executive Summary**
We propose the creation of an Institute of Arts and Culture under the auspices of the Ethereum Foundation, a foundational body to fund, incubate, and amplify artistic projects that communicate, challenge, and shape narratives critical to Web3’s broader societal integration.

The Institute will act as a cultural infrastructure layer, supporting artists and thinkers who bridge technology with human experience - something the current NFT/tokenization-driven approaches have failed to do sustainably or meaningfully. By cultivating storytelling, visual language, and participatory art grounded in decentralised principles, this Institute will help inform and align culture with the ideals of Web3 - ultimately driving organic, values-based mass adoption.

## **Why This Is Needed**

**1. Culture Precedes Adoption**

Technological revolutions are not adopted because of their functionality alone, but because they embed themselves into cultural consciousness. The printing press, the internet, and open-source software all reached mass adoption only after artists, writers, and thinkers made them socially legible and emotionally resonant.

Web3 is currently perceived as abstract, elitist, or speculative. A focused cultural push is essential to translate its ideals: decentralisation, self-sovereignty, and collective governance - into lived, felt experiences.

**2. NFTs and Tokenised Art Missed the Mark**

While NFTs were initially celebrated as a means to empower artists and decentralize creative ownership, the reality has been sobering:

* Speculative mania overshadowed meaningful cultural production.
* Most art was financialized before it was contextualized, leading to shallow engagement.
* Collectors became flippers; audiences became exit liquidity.
* Algorithmic value replaced human and cultural value.

Rather than fostering a new renaissance, tokenization often reduced art to commodities, undermining its potential to inform or transform culture.

Moreover, many NFT projects lacked meaningful engagement with diverse artistic practices and global cultural narratives, limiting their relevance and accessibility. Consequently, the NFT space became isolated from broader societal issues and failed to build sustainable ecosystems that support artists beyond momentary market trends. This disconnect underscores the need for a more thoughtful, inclusive, and impact-driven approach to integrating Web3 technologies with arts and culture, one that shifts the focus from speculation to symbiosis, and from digital abstraction to cultural, social and ecological responsibility.

**3. A New Infrastructure for Cultural Meaning-Making**

The Institute will fill this gap, not by repeating NFT-era mistakes, but by grounding support for art in public goods logic, critical inquiry, and community involvement. Instead of focusing on marketable objects, we’ll support process-based, context-rich, and intellectually rigorous art practices.

# **Why Web3 Must Engage With Arts & Culture**
Web3 is not just a technical infrastructure, it is a cultural proposition. But without meaningful dialogue with artists, thinkers, and cultural workers, we have seen it become:

* Insular, recycling its own language and values without external reflection
* Speculative, dominated by financialization and hype instead of long-term social impact
* Disconnected from lived realities, failing to address historical context, identity, power, and memory

To mature, Web3 must enter into deep and sustained dialogue with global arts and culture, not only to be understood, but to be challenged, stretched, and transformed.

Web3 must not exist in isolation from the world’s most urgent cultural and ecological realities. To remain relevant, it must engage in dialogue with global arts and culture, not only to reflect a diversity of narratives and lived experiences but to ground itself in the material conditions and crises shaping our time. Art, inherently political, offers a vital lens through which decentralised technologies can be examined, critiqued, and reimagined. This Institute envisions art as a bridge between Web3 and the urgent need for planetary care, regeneration, and cultural resilience, creating space for open-ended exploration rather than prescriptive agendas.

## **Why It Matters**
Artists are sense-makers. They hold tools to reflect, critique, and imagine societal transformation in ways that code alone cannot. Culture shapes adoption. Mass adoption will not come from better UX alone, it comes when people see themselves, their struggles, and their stories reflected in a technology. Diverse narratives resist monoculture. Without cultural plurality, Web3 risks becoming an echo chamber of Western techno-solutionism.

## Our Role
The Institute will act as a cultural membrane, translating between the abstractions of blockchain and the textures of real life. It will facilitate exchanges where code meets context, protocol meets poetics, and decentralisation becomes a living, evolving cultural force.

# **Core Objectives**

**Fund and support artists** who explore the social, political, and existential dimensions of decentralised technologies.

**Produce exhibitions, publications, residencies, and performances** that communicate complex Web3 ideas to general audiences.

**Serve as a living archive of decentralised culture**, tracking its evolution and influence.

**Facilitate dialogues between technologists, artists, and communities** to co-create meaning and direction.

**Design new economic models for cultural funding** that prioritize sustainability over speculation, e.g., quadratic funding for art, DAO-based curatorial collectives, or post-NFT patronage structures.

**Foster Cultural Exchange Between Crypto and Global Arts**
Establish partnerships, residencies, and joint programs connecting Web3 creators with artists and cultural institutions worldwide. This two-way exchange will enrich both ecosystems, bringing fresh artistic perspectives into crypto spaces and introducing decentralised values to established cultural sectors.

**Support Artists Amidst Funding Cuts & Censorship**
Governments around the world are slashing public arts funding. [Berlin faced a €130 million cut in 2025](https://www.ft.com/content/37e19262-ccba-4d87-b825-929c998f5872), forcing closures and protests. Likewise, [U.S. federal arts bodies (NEA, NEH, PBS, NPR) endured massive budget and staff reduction](https://www.sfchronicle.com/entertainment/article/trump-doge-arts-funding-cuts-20273309.php), with numerous grants abruptly canceled in early 2025. In Singapore, the [National Arts Council revoked funding for performance artists](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Arts_Council%2C_Singapore) citing content restrictions. Our Institute will provide an alternative support system - resilient, international, and insulated from political volatility.

**Counteract Political & Self-Censorship**
Cultural funding cuts often coincide with censorship pressures. For example, the [Trump administration shut down exhibitions at the Art Museum of the Americas involving DEI-focused or queer artists](https://www.artwalkway.com/trump-arts-funding-cuts). Similarly, institutions in the U.K. and Australia have limited funding to artworks considered overtly political. The Institute will champion free expression by protecting creators whose work tackles sensitive or controversial themes.

**Translate Decentralisation into Human Narratives**
Beyond tech, the Institute will facilitate cultural translation - through residencies, talks, and multimedia exhibitions - so that decentralisation isn’t abstract code, but lived stories and art that engage hearts and minds.

**Pilot Sustainable Funding Models Beyond NFTs**
Rejecting the speculative NFT rush, the Institute will experiment with models like quadratic funding, patronage DAOs, and grant-to-impact frameworks that directly reward cultural value and narrative impact rather than market hype.

# Art as Regenerative Infrastructure: Connecting Culture to Living Systems

In addition to acting as a cultural membrane, the Institute will pilot a groundbreaking model that connects artistic expression directly to real-world ecological regeneration. Drawing inspiration from projects like Crosslucid, which use dynamic digital artworks to fund and activate ecosystem restoration, the Institute will support artists in creating works that are not only symbolically but materially entangled with regenerative outcomes.

These regenerative art projects will leverage decentralised mechanisms - such as snapshot-triggered donations, regenerative DAOs, or blockchain-certified biodiversity credits - to fund on-the-ground ecological initiatives. By embedding regenerative logic into the DNA of the artwork itself, we enable cultural production to become a vector for planetary care.

For example:

* A digital artwork evolves in response to the ecological progress of a reforestation project in Colombia or an agroecology initiative in Southern Italy.
* Community participants who engage with or collect the work help unlock direct funding for regenerative projects through microtransactions or on-chain governance actions.
* AI-generated art pieces morph in tandem with measurable climate or biodiversity impact, turning environmental data into living visual narratives.

This new category of "regenerative artworks" will form a key pillar of the Institute's programming - positioning artists not just as commentators on the climate crisis, but as active agents in healing the planet.

By supporting collaborations between artists, ecologists, regenerative farming cooperatives, and technologists, we will foster transdisciplinary practices that blur the boundary between culture and ecology. This approach offers a concrete pathway for aligning Web3 with the material realities of the climate emergency, countering digital abstraction with embodied, place-based engagement.

Through this initiative, the Institute affirms that art is not just a mirror to society - it can be a seedbed for regeneration, a living system of interconnection where decentralised aesthetics meet planetary ethics.

# **Impact on the Web3 Ecosystem**

**Narrative Legibility:** Help the public understand why decentralisation matters, beyond financial speculation.

**Community Building:** Art is a vector for belonging; this Institute will attract people into Web3 not for gains, but for purpose.

**Social Coordination:** Artistic metaphors and stories are how complex systems are grasped. By shaping language and visual culture, the Institute will enable more effective governance, participation, and experimentation.

**Long-Term Adoption:** Art is a long game. Institutions like Bauhaus or [Black Mountain College](https://www.blackmountaincollege.org/history/) shaped generations of design and tech, our Institute will do the same for Web3.

# **Curatorial Framework: Decentralised, Plural, Narrative-Driven**
A core differentiator of the Institute will be its approach to curation, not as a top-down gatekeeping function, nor as an algorithmically-driven popularity contest, but as a collaborative, intentional process that bridges critical thought, global perspectives, and emerging cultural narratives. This framework will also explicitly prioritize emergent and underrepresented artists across geographies, identities, and disciplines.

Key Principles:

**1. Beyond Digital Art: Embracing Hybrid, Post-Digital Practices**
While we will support digital-native and blockchain-integrated art, our curatorial scope goes far beyond NFTs or generative visuals.

We are interested in works that engage with decentralisation thematically—across mediums such as:

Installation and spatial interventions
* Social practice, and collaborative projects
* Sculpture: including public, site-specific, or experimental material approaches
* Painting: from traditional to conceptual or politically-engaged forms
* Performance, ritual, and social practice
* Sound and experimental media
* Archival projects, zines, and publications
* Indigenous storytelling and oral histories
* Public art and tactical interventions
* Hybrid formats that defy categorisation

This broad scope allows us to surface voices and practices that speak to decentralisation without necessarily focusing on digital art.

**2. Independent, Global Curators as Co-Creators**
Curation will be carried out in collaboration with independent curators from diverse geographies and cultural contexts, many of whom may have no prior affiliation with Web3. This deliberate outreach ensures that Web3 narratives are challenged, contextualised, and expanded, preventing ideological echo chambers and technological insularity. Curators will work alongside Web3-native thinkers to develop thematic programs.

**3. Open Curatorial Proposals & Participatory Selection**
The Institute will also launch open calls for curatorial proposals, enabling collectives, emerging curators, and artist-run initiatives to shape the narrative. A rotating Curatorial Assembly, comprised of both on-chain community delegates and off-chain experts, will evaluate proposals through a deliberative and transparent process.

**4. Narrative-Driven Programming**
Rather than curating around trends or markets, we will anchor our programming in deep narratives - social, historical, and speculative. Curation becomes a form of storytelling: creating connections between ideas, people, and timeframes.

**5. Prioritising Emergent and Underrepresented Artists**
We aim to elevate artists who lack access to legacy art systems or crypto infrastructure, including:

* Indigenous, queer, diasporic, and postcolonial voices
* Rural or non-urban artists disconnected from funding or institutional support
* Practitioners using traditional forms (like sculpture or painting) to respond to contemporary themes.

**Why This Matters**
The NFT boom flattened artistic value to surface-level aesthetics and financial speculation. Our curatorial approach restores depth, diversity, and deliberation to how art is chosen, framed, and experienced in Web3. By involving global curators, we ensure that the cultural narratives shaping Web3 reflect plural, planetary imaginaries, not just Silicon Valley’s techno-futurism.

# **R&D Support for Tech-Integrated Art Practices**

Supporting artists working with Web3, AI, and emerging technologies requires dedicated funding for research and development - phases often overlooked in traditional grant models. These early stages of experimentation, prototyping, and ideation are foundational to innovation but rarely produce immediate outputs, making them hard to fund within conventional frameworks.

Tech-integrated art practices also involve significant costs: cloud services, model access, gas fees, software licenses; and demand technical fluency with often unstable or experimental open-source tools. Many artists end up building custom systems from scratch, yet lack the resources to compensate themselves or collaborate meaningfully with developers, whose fees often consume limited budgets.

Artists are expected to be simultaneously creative directors, engineers, and system architects. To support truly groundbreaking work, we must resource not just the output, but the entire infrastructure of making, including development, collaboration, and long-term preservation. This includes funding the archiving of tools, models, and environments to ensure artworks remain accessible and conceptually intact well beyond their initial deployment.

# **Budget and Funding Model**
We propose a hybrid funding model drawing from:

- A base grant from the Ethereum Foundation.
- Matching funds via quadratic funding rounds through Gitcoin-style platforms.
- Community-governed treasury powered by governance tokens tied to cultural impact, not speculation.
- Collaborations with DAOs, public institutions, and universities for programmatic support.

# **Conclusion**
The Web3 movement is at a cultural impasse. For all its promise, it lacks resonance beyond the niche. If we are serious about building a decentralised future, we must invest in cultural institutions as seriously as we invest in protocols.

The proposed Institute of Arts and Culture is a timely, necessary, and visionary step toward making Web3 not just understandable, but desirable, not just usable, but culturally compelling. Web3 communities can provide global, decentralized infrastructure to preserve, fund, and celebrate art - even when traditional systems fail.

We welcome the opportunity to collaborate on making this vision a reality.