The Sphere

“What’s all of this about?”, you might ask yourself when entering this place.

Trust us, we do understand you. We also felt like that not long ago.

Then, before we knew it, we’re inside looking out asking ourselves “What’s all of that about?”.

The Sphere is a project aiming to rewire how we fund performing arts. We’re aiming to create a way for everyone who is interested in a specific sort of performing art to invest and co-own the community or ecosystem they love and care for so much. This means that the audience will co-own the artworks together with the artists, technicians, cultural professionals and all potential stakeholders.

We’re creating a way for people who care for performing arts to invest in an entire community of artists and let that cosmo-local milieu decide how to spend the cash on art production through using new governance processes enabled by distributed ledger technologies (blockchain).

The Sphere aims to become a place of mutually transformative exchanges and development between artistic processes (art flows) and funding practices (economic flows), pragmatically experimenting with new modes of funding in the arts and beyond.

To begin with The Sphere is focusing on the contemporary circus scene with an existing transnational community full of experts on practices that demands skin in the game. To walk the talk together. 

In the creation of the sphere’s cyber-physical infrastructure (what will enable the users to participate in this ground breaking…what to call it…let’s say business model) we’re inviting all of y’all to labs, open office sessions and online seminars and discussions. We’ve divided our working sessions into four different areas of focus and interest:

The Anarchive:

a dynamic, process-oriented archive of artistic works that operates as a digital common repository for artistic knowledge and practice;

An IP management system:

to facilitate collaboration within decentralized open value networks. Also referred to as “contributive accounting”.

Smart contracts for rights management:

a blockchain-based rights management system designed to protect intellectual property rights, ensure creator retribution and generate revenue in an open-source economy.

A cryptoeconomic interface:

developed in collaboration with the company Curve Labs, enabling liquid ownership and dynamic governance structures adapted to the coming economy.

Each development layer is the occasion for exploratory research-creation processes that will unfold over a series of open collaborative events and workshops over the next 3 years.

And you know what?
The Sphere is funded by Creative Europe for the development of a digital infrastructure for self-organization in the performing arts. Awesome!

Main Partner: 

Partner Organizations: 

Amazing kick-ass companies that are partnering up with all of us to make The Sphere possible: