Designing Yourself Out
The question that poses itself when looking further, past the end of the master program, is: How dependent is your final project on your direct involvement? Delegating responsibility is a crucial skill to avoid burning out, but completely removing oneself from the project you conceived is a harrowing thought – after all you were the person that brought this solution into existence. Despite this it's important to stress that designing yourself out, to make the maker obsolete, is a very powerful step in the evolution of every project, if done right.
It has to be done with care, however: Do it too early and the initiative will not carry itself forward without the founder's energy. Do it too late and it will restrain the intervention from organic growth and hinder its scalability, effective locking out relevant communities to shape and adapt it to their own needs. So how do we determine the correct point in the lifecycle of each intervention when it's time to start saying goodbye and gradually removing yourself from the process?
For my final intervention, this point clearly is not reached yet and won't be in the mid-term future. As an audiovisual experience, it relies heavily on the curation of the individual artist that is able to give it its unique look, feel and message. Despite this fact, we can speculate about possible alternatives. One is to create a community around the technological investigation of organic ecosystems to decentralize the project early and enable future events to be organized with the community. This can be done in form of a traditional online community or even as a web3-native decentralized autonomous organization. I done correctly, the latter would directly limit the amount of influence of me, the original founder through an egalitarian voting architecture (e.g. quadratic voting, reputation tokens).
Furthermore, a promising idea is to integrate the final exhibition in the broader context of an existing community that is already engaged with these sort of topics. Generative NFT communities, audiovisual artist collectives and computer artists with a strong mathematical background are loosely organized via Twitter, Discord and Instagram on these topics. These communities often exist within larger web3 tribes. The step to exhibit our four installations at Akasha Hub was therefore the intuitively right one: As a crypto-centric community hub and co-working space run by a blockchain non-profit it is connected with these communities in a myriad of ways. This makes me hopeful, that there are very exciting things to come.
Photo by Luca Bravo on Unsplash