To kick off our Season 03 theme of Creatives First, we're pleased to announce the first round of RefractionDAO Creative Grantees.
The program allocated up to $100,000 USDC for three tiers of funding: microgrants under $1,000, mid-weight under $5,000, and heavy-lift under $10,000. All grants have a production requirement that will see through fruition of the project and add to the DAO's creative ecosystem.
Refraction received over 150 submissions from creatives spanning the globe for its inaugural application round. These encompassed a wide range of projects including written editorial, radio programming, events, art galleries, metaverse builds, flea markets, plays, and work within Refraction's guilds.
The 24 selected proposals included a sustainable fashion label expanding into digital wearables; an in-person web3 flea market in Miami; an on-chain Romeo & Juliet-style play co-written with GPT-3; a project to bring community radio on-chain; a curated arts-event series centering on trans and queer creatives; and building a community studio in Medellín, Colombia.
We want to thank all grant applicants, and encourage you to follow Refraction's socials and editorial as we continue to roll out these projects and announce future support initiatives.
Explore the full list of Creative Grants project below, or visit our project gallery. To stay on top of the latest developments, apply to join RefractionDAO for access to the Creative Grants Discord forum channel.
Main image courtesy of the African NFT Community.
The African NFT Community strives to provide artists from Africa and within the Diaspora representation at major art events, while also confronting the challenges of gatekeeping and barriers to entry.
Terrain by Agoston Nagy is a collection of generative artworks that respond to climate change. Each iteration of an artwork initiates climate positive interventions in natural, biological environments by using automated donations to different rewilding and reforestation organizations programmed into its smart contract. The supported organizations are chosen through transparent, public community voting sessions.
XING STUDIOS: Digital Fashion NFTs
XING STUDIOS is a sustainable fashion label ethically made in NYC using only second-hand and waste materials. XING STUDIOS innovates in sustainability by becoming phygital and including digital wearables. As utility NFTs, users can wear the creations through augmented reality filters, in the metaverse or to keep as art collectibles. The sale of NFTs funds community workshops to teach mending, creative upcycling and textile art for circularity and innovation.
Common Healing: People of the Future
Common Healing is a participatory world-building studio moving at the speed of trust and with the seasons, making contributions towards an interconnected web of sustenance. As part of their Creative Grants contribution, Common Healing will launch their ‘People Of The Future’ YouTube series.
Some Of Us is an event. It is a celebration. It is the result of the collaboration of Moroccan artists in their land. It is an experience combining visual arts, music, and talks, tapping on all senses both simultaneously, and equally. It is created and fed by multidisciplinary individuals who strive to build together.
Ephemeral Acts is a bicoastal event series of polished audiovisual shows in San Francisco and New York featuring artists in the live audio-visual communities, produced by Andy Rolfes and Dan Gorelick. This event series is the first phase of a larger vision to develop a playbook for producing shows, aiming to create an international network among the existing live audio-visual creative-technology communities.
The Gospel Truth: The Sonic Architectures of House and Go-Go
Together, Anisa Olufemi and Jada-Amina traverse the undergrounds of the Chicago house and Washington, DC go-go music scenes, paying homage to the homegrown genres and their respective chocolate cities, left bankrupt by cultural erasure and targeted displacement. Using the Black Church as a theoretical reference point, The Gospel Truth consists of two programs taking place in DC and Chicago featuring immersive video installations, sound design, and a live music experience.
Ziro Focus is an ongoing project bringing together Indian and Welsh artists to collaborate, promote and distribute their work through web3 technologies. The project is realized by Ziro Festival (India) and Focus Wales (UK), supported by the British Council and Arts Council of Wales. Ziro Focus will release "Rerarehei," a collaborative song between singer Mangka and producer Eadyth, as an NFT and produce a live event and workshop on music NFTs.
Bubblegum Club is a cultural organization based in Johannesburg, South Africa, working across platforms and mediums. The organization consists of a digital publication, a studio, and an art gallery. Ghostland, a new music vertical and metaverse, is Bubblegum Club’s latest launch.
COLORSxCOMMUNITY: IMMANENTIZING INTERNET NATIVE ARTIFACTS AND PRACTICES
COLORSxCOMMUNITY establishes an online space for creatives to facilitate their works, practices, and dialogues. COLORSxCOMMUNITY curates artifacts from their internet-native curation to display at an event programme with workshops and installations.
Virtual Escapes is an NFT collection created by São Paulo-based artist Denu that marks their first solo exhibition.
Join digital artist Fabiola Larios and the Miami AI/web3 community for this in-person 'Yami-Ichi' (flea market), with goods and art sourced from the local community.
Endless Return, Singapore's renegade rave experiment is taking over RexxKL with a new manifestation, Endless Return: Backroads. It will merge the pastoral with the profane, fusing the best of web3 with experimental music acts from around the region in an audiovisual installation at the frontier of art and technology.
HIVEMIND is a community of emerging artists in web3 focused on welcoming artists from all over the world to be a part of a community where they can express themselves and support each other. The Creative Grants programme will support the collective in their ongoing Discord radio efforts, and to launch a website for the Hivemind community.
In Place Of War: La Guarida (The Den)
La Guarida (which roughly translates to The Den) is a community project in the El Faro neighbourhood of Medellín, a haven for young people to gather, make music in a dedicated studio, and to create art and cultivate their own food crops in a community garden.
Romeo and Juliape is a web3 play, a fully on-chain human-AI love story co-written with GPT-3 that comes to life through five collector-instigated "acts": mint, stake vote, claim, burn.
MaHalla Berlin: Monster Mutations
A curated, ambient live laboratory celebrated in a cathedral-like 9,000 square metre turbine hall built in 1897, which is used today for the public to gather and experience mental expansion.
Here & Now is an interactive virtual art experience that showcases emerging and established artists on the Tezos blockchain. Edition 5 is the next installment of the series.
0ral B1nary is a generative musical and visual piece by fxHash leaderboarders, and networked and generative poetry pioneers, Nathaniel Stern and Sasha Stiles.
Miami Community Radio is an online radio live streaming platform currently evolving into a DAO. MCR addresses the infrastructural equalities that local creatives face with new opportunities to showcase work.
S.E.E.D_dao | Chapter 01: Parallel Biome Hypothesis
S.E.E.D_dao is a cross-disciplinary collective of web3 artists conceiving artistic practices as well as an exhibition experience that brings together immersive environments and the development of a curatorial axis of works in NFT and IRL.
SOUND OBSESSED: Sonic Arts Showcase
SOUND OBSESSED, a hybrid community of musicians working at the intersection of art, sound, science, and emergent technology, shares a 3D exhibition of the latest innovation in the sonic arts.
Mutual Love vision is a web3 ecosystem with aims to build generational wealth, access, intellectual ownership, and equity on-chain for trans and queer folks, in partnership with our trusted allies. The Creative Grants programme will support the next installment of their in-person curated event series, centering trans/queer creators and curators in celebrating agency, possibility, and abundance on-chain.
POESIA DE PROTESTA is an exhibition featuring 10-12 Spanish poems written by women living in countries such as Cuba, Colombia, and Venezuela. The texts express a form of protest: political, economical or social. A visual artist interprets each poem, with curation by Cuban historian and art professor Gladys Garrote.
Artists Connie Bakshi and Ellie Pritts reflect on how AI influences their work and perspectives on storytelling, identity, and the evolving role of the artist following their curation in Livepeer x Refraction's Limitless AI exhibit in Bangkok.
