More than Just a Style
If you’ve kept tabs on the emerging tools available to artists in the blockchain sector, you’ll recognize the absolute powerhouse we’ll be talking to today - DADA. Co-founders Beatriz Ramos, Judy Mam, and Abraham Milano took hold of the opportunities with the Ethereum blockchain to establish a fully autonomous and digital platform that allows creatives to not only make new work with a new decentralized paradigm, but also utilize smart contracts to monetize and sustain these creative practices.
The goals of DADA are lofty and piercing, like creating a new value for art “where the values are collaboration and collective ownership.” (Source) DADA isn't afraid to take the age-old art market head on, challenging the status quo of struggle that is unfortunately paired with any creative ambitions.
Today, we’ll have a chance to hear from them - their entry into the space, their reception thus far, and their ambitions as they pave the way for a decentralized and empowered future for artists.
The Creative Crypto (CC): Hello Judy! Thank you for joining us and to get everything started, tell us a bit about the DADA team and how you got into the world of blockchain.
Beatriz is an artist and entrepreneur and created DADA about 4 years ago. I met her when I was a creative director in advertising. I was her client. Years later she invited me to collaborate on DADA. It was only when she attended the Ethereal Summit last year that Beatriz became convinced that blockchain was the way to go for us.
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Judy Mam at the Christie's Art + Tech Summit and Beatriz Ramos at Ethereal NYC
CC: How did you think to create the DADA platform?
At first, DADA was created as a community for artists to meet and find professional opportunities. We were trying to solve the problem of how to find reliable talent, how to get to know the artist behind their work. We soon realized that to get to know the artists we needed to give them the tools to express themselves as they do best, which is by creating art. We created a system of visual conversations where you make a drawing with our simple tool and someone from anywhere in the world can reply to you with another drawing. We were blown away by the spontaneous visual conversations that sprang from this dynamic, and the deep bonds that they inspire. It is a new form of conversation that truly creates community.
Decentralization is a great opportunity for creating new economic models for artists that are more fair, more direct, more efficient and more democratic. Art does not need to be a financially ruinous profession for creators, nor remain in the realm of the unaffordable and the unattainable for consumers.
CC: What has the reception been and what are you working on now?
Our artists love it, they are our biggest champions. They tell us that DADA does so much for them creatively, emotionally, and socially. Artists who didn’t know each other, from different countries, become close friends. SerSte, one of our artists, says that DADA is like her warm bath. I doubt that anyone thinks this about Facebook.
We are currently working on fully integrating our decentralized marketplace where all the drawings will be crypto-native, probably rare and available for purchase. We are migrating our now over 100,000 drawings to IPFS, registering them on Ethereum and working on the smart contracts and encrypted certificates of authenticity. We expect to have the marketplace running in September.
We are also completely revamping our platform and improving the user experience. We want to erase the boundaries between artists, collectors and art lovers, and give a meaningful creative experience to all. DADA is a creative playground where you come to express yourself and draw with others, but let’s say that you don’t draw, you can collect art, or champion an artist or, coming soon, create your own remixes of conversations. In this sense, we are so much more than a marketplace. We want to create an art-fueled economy with a DADA token that will represent the value of the entire collection, and eventually give artists a guaranteed basic income.
CC: In a decentralized creative future, what do you expect will happen to the domain of art?
Good question! For one, I hope that we will have proved that audiences and artists can find each other without the need for gatekeepers, in whose interest it is to discourage this directness, because that’s how they shape and control the market. Decentralization is a great opportunity for creating new economic models for artists that are more fair, more direct, more efficient and more democratic. Art does not need to be a financially ruinous profession for creators, nor remain in the realm of the unaffordable and the unattainable for consumers. Decentralization has the potential to scale creative production, not only for visual artists but for musicians, writers, filmmakers. It is inherently collaborative and community-oriented. I hope that new participatory models of creative production and distribution can flourish. We need to re-learn to cooperate in order to prosper together.
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Judy and Abraham at the BCI Summit
CC: For new artists curious but not yet in the blockchain space, what would you say to them?
Be truly curious and do your research! This is a complex topic, but at the same time, being in this space feels like it must have felt to live in the Renaissance. There are so many smart and creative people inventing new solutions and coming up with progressive new ideas for society, it is exhilarating. So I would say not to be afraid or too cynical and be open to learn about blockchain - its advantages, its problems, and its implications. The more you learn about the technology, the more you can see the potential it has to change the world. Artists are essential to helping shape this process.
Thank you Judy for joining us today! You can learn about and join DADA through the links below. Be part of a growing community of global collaborators.
Project Name: DADA
Website: https://dada.nyc/home
Twitter: https://twitter.com/powerdada
Photos Courtesy of Alex Zammariah and Creative United (Christie's)
Images sourced from DADA
Cover Image by @zsolt.vidak
Posted from my blog with SteemPress : https://thecreativecrypto.com/democratizing-the-artistic-experience-interview-with-dada/