NFTs as a Capture Mechanism for Community Capital

Transcript

we are very lucky today um with all these amazing creators and their first-hand experiences and next we're going to have another successful artist um dave krugman and he's going to tell us about community building but before he comes on stage i'm going to tell you a little secret about him so he's known for his visual arts but also he's actually a poet and the title of this presentation can actually you know tell you about it it's nfts as a capture mechanism for community capital i think it's quite a poetic name for for a presentation welcome dave and uh enjoy the presentation thank you so much thank you hey everybody thank you so much for

being here i'm really excited to talk about uh some things i've been working on lately i'm very excited about everything that's happening in in the blockchain space especially in regards to artists and artists who build community so the title of my presentation is nfts as a capture mechanism for community capital and it sounds a lot more complicated than it really is but really my point is that um i really truly believe uh that all value in the world is rooted in in community systems whether it's you know one person with one other person or you know massive communities the size of countries there's like there's really the purpose of of you know any token whether it's money or or newer tokens

that we're building is um as a medium of exchange for you know community favors and and to kind of strengthen the inner bonds of community so today i'm going to take you through how i've used photography to build communities and build value for the communities that that i'm curating so without further ado i'll begin let's see here so i'm first going to talk about um something that's not strictly my art but is uh something that i've been building for a long time if you want to follow along on your phone by the way you can go to allships.com this qr code will also take you to our twitter um but if you look at the website it'll

make a lot more sense what i'm describing so yeah again allships.co so all ships is a kind of rebellion against everything i don't like about web 2 and social media the juggernauts that kind of dominate uh our entire global conversation right now um one of my biggest frustrations as an artist who made their living on instagram for a decade is that i felt like i was constantly building on land that i didn't own uh we're kind of renting land and renting our identities from from people that um you know whose intentions are not necessarily aligned with our with our own and just to be a little more specific about that you know i i spent every single day for a long long time building up this

this following right on on instagram and other platforms and one little change in that that global algorithm can undo years of work and you don't really own uh the access that you think you own to the communities that you've built up so i think one of the promises of these new layers of technology is that we can build on land we own so all ships is kind of a space that i created for my creative communities in order for us to avoid a lot of the pitfalls of social media and so that the effort we put into building our communities can be maintained as opposed to lost to this algorithmic narrowing of our perspectives um the name all ships is about you know i think

as technology expands the fertile ground on which we can build there's more space for everyone and and all ships rise with the tide so as we as we grow and we thrive we can bring a lot of people along with us and that's kind of the ethos behind everything there um i want to prove to artists especially younger artists that a creative life is possible and again as we become more and more visual and more and more visually literate we all have cameras in our pockets and screens to display an infinite stream of art there's a lot more room for creativity and so there's never been a better time to be a creative and all chips is kind of my uh platform in which to to prove that um and and lastly about all ships one one more thing is that

i'm finding that web 3 is a better place to build identity for community builders because of all the things that i just said about social media as well this just seems like a more a more sovereign place for artists to be so this is this is our site it's kind of a an editorial i think i can hit play here oh yeah so this is a um it's an editorial website it's a we throw huge events all over the world we just want to bring people together and and elevate every you know every one of these people you might recognize some of these names is is an artist who's doing

really cool things in the nft and web3 space so we we have this editorial website we throw events we have a podcast and ev every layer of um content and community engagement we're trying to build here we also recently have kind of made this a more web 3 experience where we have a token gated merch store where you can hold certain nfts and get discounts and i also just did my latest drop drip drop which i'll get into in a moment on this website as well so just trying to build a community for artists by artists is really really important to me when we're talking about building communities so yeah do do join us on the website and join our discord as well

one of the things we're doing is is kind of world building i'm trying to build like an entire universe around um the all ships brand like and in order to kind of propagate uh the that ethos of all ships rise with the tide we're commissioned we're using nft sales to commission artists and um try to elevate as many people as possible and the other thing that's important for me about all ships is i've been building in internet um communities for my whole life and one thing that's always been really important is stuff like this like getting together in in real life and actually meeting each other and that to me is like the rebar and the concrete and it really helps

reinforce communities in a way that they can be much longer lasting so one of the things that we try to do at all ships is we do events i don't know if anyone's been to new york and brooklyn but we have a partnership with roberta's pizza which is this really fun pizza spot and you know okay all right let's go and uh just last week we had like 150 people there you know open bar free pizza for everyone and it was right after nftnyc and it was this kind of beautiful celebration of the in real life community that then you know when we all go back to our homes and different countries we uh we have a much stronger community because we all met up in person that's really important to the all ships ecosystem as well so here's here's a shot uh from

from that one of those days and you can just see like the joy and smiles on everybody's face when we build uh creative communities that are based on you know uplifting everybody and just being open and inclusive of everyone as well so yeah seeing this makes me really happy here um so now i'm going to shift a little bit uh if anyone has questions about all ships i think i'm going to open up a little q a in a bit but i want to talk about using nfts as a way to strengthen like the inner bonds of creative communities so i did a project called drive again you can if you this qr code will just take you to the openc page if you want to like see what we've been building um drive is a collection of 111 vehicles it's all street photographs i took i

actually took the entire project over 10 years all shot on iphone and the reason i kind of led with this in my nft career was because it it's important to me to show that you don't have to spend a lot of money to make good art um and so i really wanted to lead with an iphone project so that anybody with a phone can can understand that they can come up with these ideas and build community around them as well the reason i'm bringing up drive today is because i i was able to kind of learn from things i saw in the nft space and use nfts as incentive tokens in order to strengthen the again the inner bonds of a community so i really i sold 91 cars

on auction like a used car salesman um and then i decided that i was going to take the craziest looking cars um and i was going to hold them back in my garage and the only way that you could access those those tokens was to hold one of the cars and then you had to you know race me in these creative challenges on twitter um my favorite i've done a bunch of different creative challenges but i think my favorite example is i would say to my holders hey you if you hold a drive car you can go out in your environment find a car that fits the meme you know and uh then you post it in this in the race thread and as a community we're going to vote on who you know which one fits the

best and then i'll airdrop one of those trophy tokens a trophy car to you like like almost like we were drag racing and you won my car off of me right so i thought it'd be a fun idea but i didn't realize how powerful this would be um so because i have this like community treasury and i i've only released 5 out of 20 so i saw 15 of these things left i have 15 more opportunities to align incentives within my communities you know we could do a charity fundraising challenge we could uh do so there's just an infinity of ideas in front of us about how to use these tokens to uh motivate people to either act creatively or you know really just do anything

and what's cool about it is as the project thrives and grows and more and more people hear about it this incentive becomes more and more attractive because for example the floor on drive right now is five eth so like each one of these tokens now is is like a pretty strong incentive for people to participate so every time we do a race the interest grows and that helps the project and then you know the incentives become more and more powerful and we can do more and more so i like to use drive as an example of how to use nfts to add value and uh incentivize and align incentives in your communities so i think i covered everything on on that on that slide but i guess the last thing i'll say is that

a strong community united and purpose is very valuable um and that's really the thing that that builds community is is aligned incentives so here are here's the entire collection um so all the cars uh north of the bottom line are the ones that were uh on sale then there was eight grails which were on auction the highest auction went for like i think 25 eth and then which helped like really like boost the entire collection because it gave this perceived value to the community that these things are worth something and then the entire bottom line here is all the trophy cars so you can see like this one in the bottom is this alien

uh there's funky paint jobs and all sorts of graffiti and and just like these were the ones that are used as incentive tokens for the community um uh yeah so again you can check out this collection and and um this is basically the root of the idea that um you can use nfts as you know community alignment incentives and this kind of proved to me that that thesis could work um so you know i've kept my supply of different you know artistic tokens um pretty scarce until about two weeks ago so for the past year i've been working

on another project um kind of from everything i learned about doing drive i was like we i need to figure out a way to expand my community because drive became almost immediately inaccessible to people because it you know got very popular very quickly so i started thinking how do we how do we scale creative communities and i i kind of came up with this thesis in my head i actually tweeted it yesterday and it will be the final slide in my presentation but to jump ahead a bit um the thesis here is is like concentric circles so i have my one-of-one artwork which is very high priced and very you know i've only released you know 10 pieces in in the course of my nft career um

and that's the center circle and then the circle that allowed more people into my community was drive right and then as time went on and more and more people wanted to enter my artistic ecosystem i needed to find a way to keep adding rings so that people could still have access and my idea for this was an idea called drip drop so how many people are here are familiar with art blocks squiggles and okay so i'm very very inspired by squiggles and and ringers and fidenzas and the whole art blocks ecosystem but i've always really wanted to figure out a way to do an ode to that ecosystem so i decided what if i could use the universe itself and the laws of physics as the base code for a creative project and uh i've always been obsessed

with taking pictures of rain hitting puddles in times square and i was like oh well like the rain and the lights flickering and everything changing constantly and i have these this low light camera that can shoot super high resolution images what if i can find a way to create an art block style project that's purely photography um and so with drip drop um i was able to kind of you know do my ode to those ecosystems um but before i get into the art from that and and the reverse engineering of the physics of all of it um i just the last thing i want to say about this is like i guess i covered everything but um yeah the last thing i'll say about this

is that every drive holder had could mint drip drop for free so basically just rewarding the the people who believed in you early by giving them free access to whatever the next ring of your ecosystem is going to be i think is very important so these are some of the shots from drip draw and you can see they're very like inspired by generative art but again they're they're just purely photography um these are the grails from the collection so we auctioned off 11 grills the total supply of this project is one thousand one hundred and eleven i took fifteen thousand pictures of puddles over the course of again seven years um as you know i wasn't planning to make it an nft project seven years ago but

i've been collecting this stuff for a very very long time and these are these it's hard to tell but these are like beautifully high resolution and and um uh there's a lot of detail in here you can see drops popping off every puddle and all the color mixing and stuff like that so the the challenge here was how do i how do i get properties and rarity out of still photographs so i worked with an incredible company called transient labs ben strauss photography you should look them up as well i'm blown away by what they're what they're building their smart contract company and and uh so much more they're two aeronautical engineers from nasa who who left their jobs to pursue solidity

development and they're just incredible and they came up with a concept what if we use machine vision to read all all these properties from all the images and then put that in a csv and that becomes the rarity systems so like basically reading the emergent properties of photography in order to create you know a beautiful bell curve of rarity so there's a couple ways that we did this um one is that they they rewrote an algorithm that self-driving cars use and they trained it to only count when every time a drop hit a puddle so one of the properties that is our rarity is you know the drop count and you can't see it on the screen unfortunately because it's a little too small but each one of those little boxes has a

confidence score on on if that's a real ripple or not right and above a certain threshold we counted it we count it in our rarity and that as one way to create uh a distribution um the next thing we did was we ran a threshold function and and basically created a color batching system so just like chromie squiggles which i'm very very inspired by again uh shout out to snowfro um we were able to have uh an entire color spectrum rarity so like we have primary tertiary secondary and tertiary color uh batching uh the other the next thing we did was the ratio of shadow versus light and so again that's bucketed from one to ten percent ten to twenty percent

all the way up to a hundred uh and that creates another distribution and then the last one we did was entropy and chaos so they wrote another algorithm that can kind of tell the interruption of uh color sequences and and uh the interruption of of the values of shadow and light in order to create um another distribution uh of rarity and all combined these come up with a very like incredible you know mix of different rarities and people are in the community are having a lot of fun trading and figuring out you know what what they want and what they like and also their aesthetic sensibilities so again um this is a very small section of the project there's over a thousand of these

and uh i just wanted to show like you know what it looks like all together so you can look that up as well um i'll i'll briefly play this i think i don't know if we have do we have audio so this talks a bit about what we wanted to build [Music] the world we live in is a beautiful thing it is infinitely detailed and deep its mysteries span from the tiniest subatomic particles to the unimaginable expanses of distant space everything we see everything we experience is bound together by an intricate code

we exist in this fractal unfolding a complex swirl of circumstance light time space matter and vibrating energy to be a photographer is to study these intricate overlaps of the laws of physics to marvel at the astounding beauty that is constantly unfolding around us to be the one that decides when to freeze an instant so that we may look even deeper together at the generative artwork of a universe unraveling every action we take is a drop on the surface of space and time and these ripples echo back from distant shores drip drop is my ode to this beauty an ode to those echoes to the overlaps of nature and civilization it is an ode

to light an ode to life and an ode to love drip drop cool so yeah so um we were able to sell out this collection and i was able to expand my community and i'm going to get to the last slide because i only have a little bit of time left but again you can just look this up on openc or dm me and i can tell you more about it um now to wrap it up um what i was able to realize through doing all of this stuff is that each one of these rings i'm building of people that want to you know be invested in my artistic ecosystem they all feed each

other and it goes back and forth right and it's like almost this artistic organism we're all building together um so the people who collect drip drop are now looking at my more expensive one of ones and and you know they're there's kind of a goal to get into drive or to get deeper into the circle and the people that are in my inner circle that believed in me from the beginning have had free access to drive and free access to drip drop and these things kind of feed each other back and forth um so you know again i just tweeted this if you want to steal a copy of it share it it's definitely like an open source idea and uh it's just something i'm thinking through in real time with all of you so uh here i'm gonna go back to that can i

um anyway i think that's my time uh i don't i don't have any time for questions unfortunately i really wanted to but i was not paying attention to the clock uh if anyone has questions please find me after and i'd be happy to happy to chat with you i love talking about this stuff so thank you all so much for the time [Music] [Music]

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