Opera Reboot, Creator Economies, TEARS Residency

Hey friends. Just wanted to provide a brief update on all of my activities. I'll try to keep it short and sweet this time.

First off, I've started to revisit my work on the project I refer to as An Opera Of/For Known & Unknowable Universes. This interdisciplinary monstrosity had consumed my entire existence at one point, becoming the source and destination of all the music, visual art, critical writings, and later even the existential decisions steering my frail meat puppet through all of life's multifarious reality gauntlets. I accumulated a substantial body of work between 2013 (start date unclear) and 2019 (end date equally unclear), including experiments in musical notations and performance choreographies, convoluted set and stage designs, endless scripts of schizo-frantic characterizations of multi-polar selves endlessly selving through an emergent auto-fiction libretto, and a handful of impactful performances in Iceland, Austria, Switzerland, and elsewhere.

Well, on the occasion of revising my personal website (tee hee hee) and applying for a fellowship opportunity at a local center for the arts, I have remembered much of the purpose and enthusiasm this project has generated for me over the years and have decided to attempt a reboot. To kick things off, I have remastered and reissued many of the core experiential notation diagrams from the first phase of the opera as on-chain artifacts, along with 5 videos that document and elaborate a performance of the work in Reykjavik, Iceland circa 2015. Here's a few of my favorites, but you can view them all on the Zora page.

Secondly, I'd like to briefly mention a research initiative that recently concluded focused on creators (artists like me) and collectors (possibly you as the recipient of this newsletter) forming reciprocal entanglements as a model (decidedly wrong yet possibly useful) of speculative cultural-economic configurations. Inspired by the editorial work I have been enjoying from Other Internet, Zora Zine, Metalabel, Friends With Benefits, and other web3-centric organizations, as well as the burgeoning design space of web3 publishing and on-chain IP, this research on Creator-Collector-Reciprocity Networks hopes to introduce a less technical reader to some of the intriguing subtleties and alluring frictions involved in these mechanics.

I am sincerely curious to hear your feedback on this work. If you are new to web3, I wonder if any of this emphasis on forming DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations) to collectively craft cultural content resonates with you, and if you give any fucks about this direction. If you are a web3 veteran, let me just say that I'm well aware that there are numerous other examples of decentralized lore crafting, post-ownership white papers, distributed sensing network ecologies, and the like, that I could have - probably should have - referenced, so this report might strike you as variously biased or naive. Yet, putting aside our protocol imperialisms and mimetically induced fever dreams, I'm very keen to engage in conversation about the core motivation in these articles: artists and patrons might form a reciprocal embrace as an autopoietic and highly resilient economic entity, allowing them to incubate a distinct cultural dialogue relatively free of the oppressive and hallucinatory ideological framework of all-invasive capitalist desire. Wut? Yeah, let's workshop it.

The research takes the form of 3 articles.

Part One introduces some ideas about breaking apart artistic creations into atomic units and the technical motivation to put these units on-chain.

Part Two unapologetically thrashes around in the warm liminal pools and minor brain damages resulting in the social configurations that coalesce from various economic orientations. I hear this one is difficult to follow, but for those that can get through it I think there may be some tantalizing nourishment for our collective designs.

Part Three asks-after WTF is reciprocity anyways, performing some self-deprecation through ritualized critique that admits the foolishness of the quest while also pondering whether the fool might be more noble than the financially motivated engineer in this regard. The series ends with an exposé into the work of our peers at DAOhaus who have rage hacked a functional prototype of a DAO-ified content publication platform.

Finally, I'd like to quickly introduce a project that has been incubating in my existential cocoon for ~4 years, a labor of precocity, precarity, and self-sacrifice, an opportunity for us to gather and align and possibly live-work together. I'm excited to announce the soft launch of the Three Ears Attenuation Residency Site. Located on 9 acres of high altitude piñon and juniper forest in Northern New Mexico, in and around a unique earthship that I have called home since 2019, this program represents the intersection of my IRL+URL interests in exploring off-grid sustainable living and on-chain regenerative thinking.

The basic idea is this:

The program is starting now, by invite only, with friends and highly aligned colleagues spending some time on the site to help me imagine potentials and manifest possiblities. The main purpose is to lay a cultural foundation and necessary coordination infrastructure to allow early residents to form reciprocal tethers to the land, local community, and their histories. I will be carefully building and strategizing the program in collaboration with these dear peers throughout the year. Starting in early 2025, I hope to have a clear economic program, auto-documentation archive, guidelines for progressive decentralization of ownership stewardship established, and to open the program to a wider community of high-trust would-be collaborators from my community.

For now, there is a simple landing page along with an early application form and operating manual. The first residents will be invited to iterate and elaborate these ideas while I maintain attentive stewardship of the site, its human and non-human inhabitants, and the call and response with the surrounding ecosystem. If you are interested in learning more about these plans, jump into the Telegram group and fill out an application. Remember, this is all being designed in production so feedback towards improvement is very welcome.

I should probably tell you about some of the cool web3 shit I'm building, and the new music that I've started composing, and some of this years travel plans to interesting destinations to collaborate and coordinate on big ideas, and some of the new research initiatives I'm incubating... and many more things... but I suppose that will have to wait until the next newsletter.

As always, thank you for reading, thank you for your careful attention and feedback, thank you for your time and consideration. Feel free to reach out if you'd like to hear more about any of these projects I've mentioned, or anything else for that matter.

Sincere regards, XOXO

TW