DOCUMENTATION
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Kelani Nichole – Founder, Transfer Gallery & Transfer Data Trust during Q&A at DECENTRALIZED FUTURES kickoff event at Lincoln Center
EVENT #1
DECENTRALIZED FUTURES KICKOFF
Introduction
On June 23rd, 2025 at Lincoln Center, Decentralized Futures brought together artists, curators, critics, and cultural theorists to explore how decentralized systems are reshaping creative practice, authorship, and collective imagination. Hosted by the Columbia University School of the Arts’ Digital Storytelling Lab (DSL) in collaboration with the Solana Foundation, the event unfolded as a dynamic space of speculation, experimentation, and critique. Through conversation, performance, and provocation, attendees examined how blockchain, generative AI, and participatory frameworks are challenging and expanding traditional models of cultural production. The gathering was part of a growing series of salons, dinners, hackathons, and prototyping sessions that ask: What might the future of creative infrastructure look like when it is co-created, decentralized, and ever in flux?
Speakers included:
- Kelani Nichole – Founder, Transfer Gallery & Transfer Data Trust
- Poof – Artist & Group Founder, DXRG (makers of DX Terminal)
- Alaska Hoffman – AI Researcher & DX Terminal team member
- Nikhil Kumar – Artist, co-founder 5x5 Studio
- Lucas Rizzotto – IRL Mad Scientist & Artist
- Lance Weiler – Artist, Founding Member & Director of Columbia DSL
- Shar Simpson – Narrative Designer, Author, Educator
- Nick Fortugno – Director of Gaming Pathways, City College of New York
Framing:
This wasn’t a demo day. It was a living system in motion—a room filled with experiments, rituals, and cultural provocations. Decentralized Futures at Lincoln Center asked: What if the creative infrastructure of tomorrow isn’t a platform, but a protocol?
1. Prototyping in Public
Lance Weiler opened the evening by inviting participants into a participatory ritual: turn to a stranger and ask, “Why are you here?” Repeat that question five times. This seemingly simple interaction created a ripple of introspection across the space.
The room transformed into a collaborative organism. The cacophony of overlapping conversations blurred boundaries between speaker and audience. The process redefined the traditional function of an event as a space of passive reception, instead placing the audience in the role of co-creator from the outset.
This beginning was more than an icebreaker. It was a signal: you are part of the system now.
Closing Thought:
In a decentralized future, creativity is not a product—it's a public process. Prototyping becomes a shared ritual of speculation and sense-making.
2. Infrastructure as Cultural Practice
Kalani Nicole’s presentation of the Transfer Data Trust offered a blueprint for a new kind of cultural infrastructure—one rooted in care, redundancy, and collective authorship. It is a decentralized archival network stewarded by artists, for artists.
Built on browser-based tools that operate offline and locally, the system hosts over 600 works distributed across six active nodes. Each node is managed by artists and institutions who commit to mutual upkeep. The archive is redundant, encrypted, and interoperable with IPFS, yet fully detached from AWS, Google Cloud, or other centralized hosts.
The infrastructure holds over $3.5M in artist proofs, and is designed not just to store—but to reanimate—digital art. Kalani emphasized the importance of tools that don’t disappear with a funding cycle, or hinge on venture capital exits. Transfer is long-term, modular, and interoperable. It embodies a refusal of black-box software and extractive media ecosystems.
Closing Thought:
In a decentralized future, infrastructure becomes a living, breathing commons—a vessel for cultural memory, governed not by scale but by shared responsibility.
IMAGINATION-SPARKING ELEMENTS
Framing:
Beyond theory, the event summoned visceral experiences. Each presentation functioned as a portal into alternate realities: haunted internets, AI-run economies, participatory ethics engines. These weren’t hypotheticals—they were invitations to play inside possible futures.
3. Speculative Economies in AI — DX Terminal
Alaska Hoffman – AI Researcher & DX Terminal team member talks about creating presonas for 35,000 AI agents
Alaska Hoffman and Poof presented DX Terminal, a simulated 1987–2000 alt-financial system populated by 35,000 AI agents, each with bespoke behaviors, speech patterns, and cultural logic.
Agents in DX Terminal included characters like “Exit Liquidity,” “The Fed,” “Geode,” and “Octopus Tattoo Artist.” These personas weren’t ornamental—they shaped how the agents traded, gossiped, and influenced human participants. Over 3,900 humans joined the simulation.
The result? A financial ecosystem that mimicked real meme-coin volatility, complete with pump-and-dumps, collapses, viral rumors (“a finger in someone’s chili”), and micro-inflations.
One key revelation: without ever optimizing for realism, the AI economy still produced success/failure ratios nearly identical to actual blockchain data. It exposed the emotional texture of markets, rather than the rational.
Closing Thought:
In a decentralized future, AI becomes a narrative device—a lens through which we simulate and decode our collective hallucinations.
4. Digital Self-Reliance — Making Burgers & Websites
Nikhil Kumar – Artist, co-founder 5x5 Studio announces a new artist residency program Nikhil Kumar delivered a poetic, layered provocation centered on the question: What does it really mean to make something from scratch? He invited the audience to consider two parallel processes—making a burger and building a website—as metaphors for technological dependency and cultural autonomy.
Drawing connections between Gandhi’s Salt March, Walden Pond, fermentation practices at Noma, and the IndieWeb movement, Nikhil called for a new form of digital self-reliance. His argument was not about rejecting complexity, but about reclaiming legibility—building systems that are understandable, ownable, and remixable by the communities that use them.
He emphasized the risks of opaque infrastructures: centralized clouds, algorithmic feeds, and interface-first ecosystems that distance us from the stack beneath. Instead, he championed open tools, small networks, and systems that support intentional friction—the kind that teaches, not hinders.
Closing Thought:
In a decentralized future, sovereignty isn’t about isolation—it’s about understanding. The more we can see and shape our tools, the freer we become.
5. Ritual of the Dead Internet — Last Human Prototype
Shar Simpson and Lance Weiler guided sound ritual set in the ruins of the internet.
Participants imagined that all human users had vanished, leaving only automated bots and haunted data behind. They were asked to create a short audio ritual—to lure or repel AI remnants. Some screamed. Some whispered. Others looped static. Phones became seance devices.
Audience members then voted on whether the ritual should draw the AI closer or keep it at bay. The experiment was eerie, embodied, and communal.
This was a live prototype for Last Human, a 10,000 sq. ft. immersive horror installation exploring AI, identity collapse, and synthetic memory. Scheduled for 2026, it will combine screenlife horror, mobile rituals, and participatory deception.
Closing Thought:
In a decentralized future, storytelling is not consumed. It is conjured. It is a ritual. And the ghosts we raise may be our own reflections.
6. Ethical Infrastructure Through Play — Funny Time Ethics Train
Lucas Rizzotto – IRL Mad Scientist & Artist prototypes an ethics engine experiment. Lucas Rizzotto turned the room into an ethics engine through a live trolley-problem game called Funny Time Ethics Train. Audience members used their phones to make impossible choices:
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A cruise ship full of children or one influencer?
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4 McDonald’s workers or a boy genius?
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Lucas or everyone else?
Each participant’s phone lit up a color based on their moral archetype:
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🔵 Blue: Preservers (save self, but value others)
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🟩 Green: Guardians (protect life at all cost)
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🟧 Orange: Architects (optimize for outcomes)
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🔴 Red: Brokers (treat life as fungible resource)
These colors formed a real-time moral map of the room. When compared with data from Tech Week, Lincoln Center’s audience skewed significantly toward Preservers and Guardians, while Tech Week leaned heavily Broker.
The game ended in uncomfortable laughter. The ethics weren’t abstract—they were animated, participatory, and embodied.
Closing Thought:
In a decentralized future, design doesn’t just scale products—it surfaces our deepest values and turns them into playable code.
EMERGING IDEAS
Framing:
Threads wove across the night—between infrastructure and art, code and emotion, memory and machine. The event wasn’t a roadmap; it was a multiverse of possibilities.
| Cultural Infrastructure |
| Networks of trust and redundancy replace extractive platforms. |
| Synthetic Sociality |
| AI personas teach us about ourselves by playing with us. |
| Embodied Storytelling |
| Performance and horror become lenses to process system collapse. |
| Digital Sovereignty |
| Future systems must be legible, remixable, and run locally. |
In a decentralized future, we don’t build apps—we craft rituals. We don’t launch platforms—we steward protocols. And every act of imagination becomes a building block in the systems to come.
EVENT #2
DECENTRALIZED CONVERSATION
See the presentation slides here
Location: Skyline at the Solana Foundation, NYC
Format: Decentralized Conversation
Co-hosts: Robbie Shilstone, Lance Weiler
On June 25th a group of artists, curators, collectors, builders, students, and representives from various institutions gathered for a decentralized conversation on the future of art on-chain. The following are some key takeaways from the discussion.
1. Creative Ecosystems are Cyclical and Vulnerable to Collapse—but That’s Not Always a Bad Thing
Participants repeatedly note that creative ecosystems - especially in digital art and Web3 - rise and fall with funding cycles, market hype, and cultural shifts. Yet what’s often seen as a breakdown may actually be an evolution.
Breakdowns are moments of transformation - inviting new models that are more participatory, localized, and adaptive.
Volatility in markets (especially crypto art and NFTs) destabilizes artist support structures.
Collapse often comes from overcentralization of attention, value, or visibility.
Some “failures” are necessary metamorphoses.
2. Funding Structures Shape Risk, Creativity, and Participation
Access to money - too much or too little - can warp the creative process.
Decentralized models imagine new funding flows that resist extractive cycles and support experimental worOverfunded spaces lead to risk-averse, derivative production (e.g., Hollywood reboots).
Underfunded spaces force survival mode, limiting experimentation.
Participants call for mechanisms (like dedicated artist funds or regenerative royalties) to insulate artists from market whiplash and speculation-driven platforms.
3. Vision, Communication, and Persistence Are Fragile but Foundational
Without a clear, communicated vision, creative ecosystems often fracture.
Decentralized futures demand new narrative infrastructure: tools to communicate, align, and co-create across diverse cultures and communities.
Vision is the compass; communication is the connective tissue.
Ecosystem failure often traces back to misaligned or unshared narratives.
Authenticity is repeatedly framed as crucial, yet difficult to sustain under constant pressure for recognition or sales.
4. Recognition is Fluid, Localized, and Inherently Unequal
While decentralization promises broader access, attention still clusters.
Recognition in decentralized futures may need to be pluralized - valuing small-scale, local, or temporal visibility over global virality.
Attention economies create recursive silos, repeating the same names and work.
1% dynamics persist even in decentralized systems - “the law of physics.”
There’s power in recognizing recognition as a cycle - you may not be seen now, but the tides change.
5. Decentralization as a Philosophical and Practical Pivot
Participants call for more inclusive, flexible, and communal modes of building—and a willingness to let go.
Evolution is embraced through intentional burial, shared authorship, and the refusal to cling to success.
Letting go (burying hits, stepping back from platforms, resisting perpetual growth) becomes a radical act.
Ecosystems that break down may not have failed - they may simply be making space for something else to emerge.
The future is not a singular trajectory, but a messy constellation of endings and beginnings.
This conversation illustrates how creative communities navigate precarity and promise - negotiating ego, market pressure, collective vision, and experimental failure. From a decentralized futures perspective, it’s not about preserving legacy systems, but prototyping resilient, pluralistic alternatives that welcome both collapse and rebirth.
EMERGING IDEAS
Framing:
The event stitched together not just stories, but shared strategies for navigating volatility, rethinking authorship, and composting old systems to seed new creative possibilities.
| Creative Collapse |
| Ecosystem failure isn’t the end—it’s a regenerative force that clears space for new forms of expression and infrastructure. Distributed Recognition Value doesn’t scale—it circulates. Recognition must be plural, temporal, and small-scale to counter 1% attention dynamics. |
Learning Without Gatekeepers
Decentralized education through peer networks, apprenticeship, and self-organized knowledge—learning becomes lateral, not hierarchical.
Platform Friction
Constraint isn’t a bug—it’s a feature. Platforms can be creative rituals, not extractive pipelines, if designed with intention.
| Letting Go as Practice Artists and ecosystems grow by releasing their “hits.” Burial is a creative act. Exit is part of the cycle. Ritualized Failure Failing in public, together, becomes a methodology—not something to be hidden or fixed, but a condition of creative evolution. Funding as Fuel, Not Filter New economic flows (e.g. regenerative royalties, crowdfunded rituals) enable risk, reduce burnout, and insulate creators from market whiplash. Narrative Infrastructure Shared stories are scaffolding. Vision must be co-created, communicated, and iterated across communities to sustain momentum. Closing Thought: In a decentralized future, creative ecosystems are not built to last forever—they are built to transform, decay, and bloom again. Attention is not owned. Value is not fixed. Art is not a product—it’s a shared act of remembering, releasing, and reworlding. |
Decentralized Futures
is a collaboration between
Columbia DSL & the Solana Foundation