Radical Friends: Decentralised Autonomous Organisations and the Arts

Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) offer unique tools for translocal peers to encode rules, relations and values into their joint ventures using blockchain technology. This new book, edited by Ruth Catlow and Penny Rafferty, who have been at the forefront of investigations into the relationship between DAOs and the arts, constitutes over 5 years of research with essays, interviews, exercises and prototypes from leading thinkers, artists and technologists across this emerging field. In recent years DAOs have been heralded as a powerful stimulus for experimentation to reshape new cultural value systems for interdependence, cooperation, and care. At a time when the mainstream artworld is focused on NFTs, this book refocuses attention toward DAOs as potentially the most radical blockchain technology for the arts, in the long term. Contributors engage with both past and emergent methodologies for building resilient and mutable systems for scale-free mutual aid. Collectively, the book aims to evoke and conjure new imaginative communities, and to share the practices and blueprints for the vehicles to get there. Radical Friends is an urgent book for the 21st Century and beyond. It shows us, in the spirit of the legendary poet and artist Etel Adnan, that the technology of the future needs to be about “togetherness, not separation. Love, not suspicion. A common future, not isolation.” Hans Ulrich Obrist How things are run is often more important than what is done. It may not be easy to establish alternative formats and infrastructures, but it’s certainly necessary… This collection shows that it is possible too. Sadie Plant 
This book is about friendship, despair and hope — a beautiful, must-read for all people who are asking unanswerable questions about life, love and the end of the world. Franco “Bifo” Beradi Web 3 diagonalises the principles of Web 1 and Web 2. Binaries are dead. Everything is both good and evil, emancipatory and oppressive, singular and infinitely replicable. Radical Friends navigates this confusing new terrain in a nuanced and accessible way that is liable to make you feel excited about the future of art, politics, and maybe even the world again. Amy Ireland, author An instant seminal compendium for people who want to gain a deeper understanding of the radical potential of crypto tech for aesthetic institutions. Harm van den Dorpel, artist & founder of left gallery.