What is Encryptoland?
Down the Rabbit Hole
Salvador Dalí (1969)
Encryptoland is an experimental – and experiential – art collective exploring the intersection of philosophy, literature, art, and crypto. Our pseudonymic presence and namesake, Alice Encryptoland, is a not-so-subtle nod to mathematician Charles Dodgson’s masterwork as Lewis Carroll that fuses art and philosophy with science. In his 1961 lecture, “Where Do We Go from Here,” Marcel Duchamp prophecized that tomorrow’s emerging artists “like Alice in Wonderland … will be led to pass through the looking-glass of the retina, to reach a more profound expression.” Tomorrow’s emerging artists, today, are increasingly creating at the intersection of once-disparate disciplines.
Anon, to sudden silence won,
In fancy they pursue
The dream-child moving through a land
Of wonders wild and new
In friendly chat with bird or beast–
And half believe it true.
Encryptoland is experimental in that it is a laboratory for ideas. Sometimes these ideas come from books, or other projects, or from dreams and memories. Sometimes the ideas don't lead to fruitful outcomes. Sometimes the ideas grow so big that they no longer can fit in this incubation space and spin out into full independent entities.
It is experiential in that what we are doing is only possible to understand through active engagement. Community is experiential: the foundation of any strong community is the push-pull of giving what you can and taking what you need to grow. Similarly, technology, art and cultural movements are experiential: builders and doers will have a richer understanding of this world than the armchair theorists.
As part of this collective, the community organizes its efforts in four ways:
Writing: The blog is a place for the community to hold itself accountable to exploring and articulating ideas, with editing responsibility rotating through different members.
Juntos: These are small, intimate topic-based discussions that are focused microcosms of community interactions, seeding ideas and generating open questions worth exploring.
Learning: We are enabling a multi-faceted ecosystem for the exchange of skills – from developers teaching artists to code, to writers and developers learning the foundations of art theory and practice from artists.
Projects: Members can launch projects through Encryptoland and request grant funding from the Encryptoland Treasury to offset minting and smart contract deployment costs.
If you are interested in following us down the rabbit hole, drop us a line on Twitter.