Welcome to the Decentralized Web For Creators open source curriculum. This course was originally developed as an online course at Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, San Francisco in spring 2024. Here you will find course materials including session notes, readings, videos and other resources.
DWeb for Creators is made possible by the support of Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web.
The first iteration of this course was lead by Roxi Shohadaee and a team of instructors including Ayana Zaire Cotton, Kelani Nicole, Mai Ishikawa Sutton, ngọc triệu, Regina Harsanyi, Sarah Friend, and Sarah Grant. Additional support was provided by Julia Russotti, Brent “Mage” Harvey, Mariette Papic, and staff from Gray Area Foundation for the Arts.
- Session 1: Introduction to Decentralized Web (Dweb) and Its Cultural Foundations with Sarah Grant and Regina Harsanyi
- Praxis 1: Command Line for Creatives with Sarah Grant and Sarah Friend
- Session 2: DWeb Lexicon and Ecosystem with Sarah Grant, Regina Harsanyi, and ngọc triệu
- Praxis 2: Data Sovereignty and Storage with Kelani Nicole
- Session 3: The Evolution of DWeb Art, Activism, and History with Sarah Grant and Regina Harsanyi
- Praxis 3: Critical DWeb Art Projects + Practices with Sarah Friend and Ayana Zaire Cotton
- Session 4: Values and Philosophical Underpinnings of DWeb with Mai Ishikawa Sutton
- Session 5: Decentralization: Sovereignty, Power, and Critical Practice in DWeb with ngọc triệu and Ayana Zaire Cotton
- Session 6: Diversification of Storage Practices with Regina Harsanyi and Kelani Nicole
- Praxis 4: Archiving and Preservation in DWeb with Regina Harsanyi
- Session 7: Governance, Cooeprative Ownership, and Cross-institutional Collaboration with Kelani Nicole
- Praxis 5: Setting Up a Mesh Network with Sarah Grant
- Session 8: DWeb's Social and Community Impact with Sarah Grant
- Praxis 6: DWeb Worldbuilding + Speculative Design with Ayana Zaire Cotton
Ayana Zaire Cotton (she/they) is an interdisciplinary artist and cultural worker from Prince George’s County, Maryland. Braiding code, performance, and abstraction Ayana speculates and worldbuilds alongside science and technology. Sankofa is a word and symbol of the Akan Twi and Fante languages of Ghana which translates to, "go back and get". Centering a sankofa sensibility, they build databases as vessels holding seed data and experiment with shuffling algorithms to spin non-linear narratives. Ayana calls this methodology “Cykofa Narration”, generating new worlds using the digital and social detritus of our existing world — resulting in a storytelling aesthetic that embodies circular time and troubles human authorship. Through engaging with language, technology, and ecology, Ayana is cultivating a practice of remembering and imagining alternative modes of being and interspecies belonging.
Kelani Nichole is a technologist and founder of an experimental media art gallery called TRANSFER. She has been exploring decentralized networks and virtual worlds in contemporary art since 2013. Nichole's focus is supporting artists with critical technology practice, and exploring alternative models of cultural infrastructure. Currently she is building the TRANSFER Archive, a decentralized data trust and cooperative model for cultural value exchange, and producing a generative documentary film 'Almost in Real Time'.
Mai is an organizer and writer focused on the digital commons and other intersections between network technologies and the solidarity economy. They are a co-founder and editor of COMPOST, an online magazine about and for the digital commons, project manager of Distributed Press, and a contributor to Hypha Worker Co-operative. They are also the Director of Fellowships of DWeb Camp, and a Digital Commons Fellow with Commons Network.
ngọc triệu (b. 1994, Vietnam) is a design researcher who practices design and research as interventions to address and reform asymmetrical power relations through the lenses of decoloniality and decentralisation. She's lived in Vietnam, Japan, the UK, and Germany where she's worked in open-source and public-interest technology, international development, humanitarian aid, pedagogical design, documentary photography, and film-making. When ngọc isn't busy distilling data into insights or contemplating ways of decolonial being, she enjoys working with clay, doing Kendo (Japanese sword-fighting), and taking long walks in the mountains.
Sarah Friend is an artist and software developer from Canada and currently based in Berlin, Germany. She is an alumni in the Berlin Program for Artists, a founder and co-curator of Ender Gallery, an artist residency taking place inside the game Minecraft, and an organiser of Our Networks, a conference on all aspects of the distributed web. Recent solo exhibitions include Off: Endgame, curated by Rhizome, Refraction and Fingerprints at Public Works Administration, New York, USA and Terraforming at Galerie Nagel Draxler in Berlin, Germany. She is on the advisory board and was formerly the smart contract lead for Circles UBI, a blockchain-based community currency that aims to lead to a more equal distribution of wealth. She was also the technical lead for Culturestake, a project that uses quadratic voting to lead to better decisions about arts funding. She was a co-founder of bitspossessed, a software development consultancy that operates as a coop, and in 2022 was a visiting Professor of blockchain art at The Cooper Union.
Sarah Grantis an American artist and professor of media art based in Berlin at the Weise7 studio. Her teaching and art practice engages with the electromagnetic spectrum and computer networks as artistic material, social habitat, and political landscape. She holds a Bachelors of Arts in Fine Art from UC Davis and a Masters in Media Arts from New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program. Since 2015, she has organized the Radical Networks conference in New York and Berlin, a community event and arts festival for critical investigations and creative experiments in telecommunications.
Regina Harsanyi is the Associate Curator of Media Arts at the Museum of the Moving Image. She also advises artist studios, museums, galleries, auction houses, and private collectors on preventive conservation for variable media arts, from plastics to distributed ledger technologies. Harsanyi previously facilitated over 200 exhibitions with a creative technology focus as Director of Programming at Wallplay after working as a Registrar at Sotheby’s. She is a graduate of New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, has taught at School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and has lectured globally.