EVENTS
HACKATHON
NOVEMBER 8th, 2025
In collaboration with Columbia University School of the Arts’ Digital Storytelling Lab, the Brown Institute for Media Innovation, and Columbia Engineering
Saturday, November 8, 2025
10:00 AM – 5:00 PM
What might creative infrastructure look like if it were designed not by centralized, algorithmic platforms, but by the communities who use it?
The Decentralized Futures Hackathon is part of an art-driven series of experiments to reimagine creative infrastructure. Over the course of one day, participants will prototype new ways of working that expand both self-reliance and community reliance:
- Self-reliance → the ability of individuals (artists, technologists, participants) to create, share, and sustain their work without being fully dependent on centralized platforms, institutions, or gatekeepers. It points toward empowerment: learning the skills, building the tools, and developing the practices to stand on your own.
- Community reliance → the recognition that creative work is not done in isolation, but thrives through networks of mutual support. It means designing systems where communities can depend on one another - sharing resources, knowledge, and care - rather than relying on opaque algorithms or extractive platforms.
Fields of creative practice are being reshaped by advances in artificial intelligence, specifically – from generative tools that alter how art is produced and distributed, to algorithmic systems that structure visibility and value. The hackathon will be a space to confront these transformations directly.
Artists, technologists, storytellers, designers, and community builders will come together to imagine and build experimental projects that reconfigure how we connect, collaborate, and sustain creative practice.
Decentralized Futures is an ongoing initiative of hackathons, salons, and dinners presented in collaboration with the Solana Foundation.
All are welcome — no matter your background or skill set. Bring your curiosity, your ideas, and your willingness to co-create.
PROTOTYPE
SEPTEMBER 4th - DECEMBER 20th, 2025
Where There’s Smoke prototype at Ryan Lee Gallery’s RLwindow on the High Line
Utilizing glitch-based techniques and pixel manipulation, Where There’s Smoke disparate storytelling elements harmonize into a personalized, time-bending presentation. Aptly, the glitch aesthetic visually mirrors the degradation of burnt objects. By embracing glitch art and recording its outputs with blockchain technology, the project complicates tensions around the digital age’s seeming permanence, versus its unpredictable pace of change.
The prototype explores inscriptions to create a memory ledger, performative mints as a form of time-based media documentation, and an open edition available to those who text the installation from the High Line.
SPECIAL LIVE EVENT: Performance and Artist Talk
November 5th
Ryan Lee Gallery
515 West 26th Street #floor 3
HACKATHON
JULY 26th & 27th, 2025
Call for Artists, creative technologists, engineers, and builders! Join us for a virtual hackathon to build new creative infrastructure. The event will include talks, case studies and workshops. An excellent opportunity to meet new collaborators and build something awesome!
TALKS
JUNE 25th, 2025
DECENTRALIZED CONVERSATION
to build the future of art on-chain
4:00 PM - 7:00 PM
Solana Skyline
141 E Houston St,
New York, New York
We're hosting an event to have a decentralized conversation to build the future of art on-chain, inviting artists, technologists, and builders to collaboratively reimagine how art is made, shared, and valued.
Through open dialogue, collective experimentation, and distributed tools, we seek to prototype new models of authorship, ownership, and creative infrastructure. This is not just a conversation—it’s a call to shape systems that are transparent, participatory, and artist-led.
Co-hosted by Robbie Shilstone, the founder & creator of Publique and Lance Weiler (aka culturehacker), Professor of Practice at Columbia University, and founding member & director of Columbia DSL.
TALKS
MONDAY, JUNE 23rd, 2025
DECENTRALIZED FUTURES
Art, Storytelling & the Edges of Innovation
Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center at Lincoln Center
6:30pm to 9pm ET
IRL & Virtual
Join us for an evening at the intersection of emerging technology and artistic inquiry. Decentralized Futures brings 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 invites participants into a dynamic space of speculation, experimentation, and critique. Through conversation, provocation, and performative exchange, we’ll examine how blockchain, generative AI, and participatory frameworks can both challenge and expand traditional models of cultural production.
This gathering is part of an ongoing new series of conversations, dinners, hackathons and prototyping sessions. Together, we ask: What might the future of art look like when it is co-created, decentralized, and ever in flux?
This is an IRL/Virtual event. A streaming link will be made available 24 hours prior to the event.
SPEAKERS
Kelani Nichole - Founder Transfer Gallery & Transfer Data Trust
Nikhil Kumar - Artist, co-founder 5x5 studio
Lucas Rizzotto - IRL Mad Scientist & Artist
Poof - Artist & Group Founder @dxrgai the makers of DX Terminal
Alaska Hoffman - AI researcher & DX Terminal game team member
Lance Weiler - Artist, founding member & director of Columbia DSL
Shar Simpson - Narrative Designer, Author, Educator
Nick Fortugno - Director of Gaming Pathways at City College of New York
Decentralized Futures
is a collaboration between
Columbia DSL & the Solana Foundation