Putting the “public” back in “public art” in one North London park and beyond

Furtherfield is an art gallery that’s been uniquely located in the heart of North London’s Finsbury Park since 2011. When COVID made its indoor space unmanageable, the Furtherfield team took it as an opportunity to reset its relationship with the Finsbury community. As a result, they not only brought their work outdoors, but also created CultureStake, a blockchain app that lets any cultural organization open up decision making to the public.

Co-creating with the local community via information-rich voting on blockchain

Formed in response to the celebrity and commercialization of London’s YBA scene in the 90’s, for almost three decades Furtherfield has embodied the grassroots DIY culture of the early internet for artists. Even though the pandemic was the catalyst for CultureStake, the team had been ready to make a change. “We had a growing feeling that bringing art from our international network into this public space was us bestowing ‘good culture’ on a locality, and we were becoming increasingly uncomfortable with it,” co-founder Ruth Catlow explains. “We wanted to work more with the different communities that used this space to see how they might shape our programs and our organization, and realized we could ask them directly about what was important to them.”

“We had a growing feeling that bringing work from our international network into this public space was us bestowing ‘good culture’ on a locality.”

As longtime followers of open source and peer-to-peer technologies, and as explorers of how emerging tech impacts society, the Furtherfield team knew they wanted to incorporate two specific decentralized tools into CultureStake:

• Quadratic voting (QV), which in contrast to one person, one vote and ranked choice systems, lets voters express both their preferences and how strong they are. QV does this by giving voters a set of credits to “spend.” Voting for the same choice multiple times “costs” more and more credits with each vote, so if you feel very strongly about something, it’s reflected. The benefit, Ruth says, is that “QV provides nuanced information about why voters want something instead of just which outcomes they want.”

• Blockchain to record the votes, which Ruth characterizes as “an immutable public record that lets people know we haven’t messed with their votes.”

“Without Hypha, we would’ve been at the end of the road and had to put the project to bed.”

For CultureStake’s first iteration, Furtherfield commissioned artist and developer Sarah Friend and later brought in fellow co-op Common Knowledge to work on its design and frontend. But when it came to the more challenging backend work of connecting the app to the blockchain, both Sarah and the firm recommended Hypha. At first, Furtherfield was nervous about handing the project to a new partner. Says Ruth, ”We were a little bit freaked out because we didn’t have a bunch of extra funding if things went wrong. We had to be sure this would work.” But then Furtherfield met with the Hypha team. “They asked really good questions. That’s how we came to feel, ‘Yes, this is doable.’”

As the work began, Ruth loved Hypha’s rigorous approach: “After every meeting, Hypha’s notes would reflect back to us everything we described along with anything that was still unknown, that they wanted additional information on, or had questions or comments about.” Through this process, Ruth says, “They kept asking questions until they knew everything. This made us feel very secure because we could see all the remaining gaps.” In addition to making the app functional — making the frontend do what it was intended to do — as planned, Hypha helped improve the design of CultureStake’s frontend as well.

“They kept asking questions until they knew everything. This made us feel very secure because we could see all the remaining gaps.”

As Furtherfield “turned the gallery inside out,” bringing art from the gallery to the park, they used CultureStake to cede creative control to the people. Calling the project People’s Park Plinth, Furtherfield commissioned a series of small extended reality artworks. Finsbury’s 50,000 visitors a week could then use CultureStake to scan QR codes and view the works throughout the park. They then could use CultureStake to vote on which piece they wanted to see realized at full scale. As part of CultureStake’s design, votes cast from within the park were weighted higher than ones made from outside it. That year, Furtherfield tripled its local engagement and heard feedback like, “I’ve been talking about this with my friends for months.”

When asked about her overall experience working with Hypha, Ruth responded, “I trusted them. I always felt like we were working with good people. Without Hypha, we would’ve been at the end of the road and had to put the project to bed.”

Confirming the usefulness and untapped potential of blockchain for art and culture

Because of recent changes to the Furtherfield team, Ruth is now seeking funding to support CultureStake’s continued growth. Even though CultureStake’s future is uncertain, Ruth says the project confirmed for her the “massive and still underexplored value quadratic voting has in the cultural setting.”

Reflects Ruth, “In trying to make a connection with our local community to understand our shared interests, CultureStake allowed for a radical inversion of how you usually run a gallery. It responded to a pragmatic issue with COVID, but also the desire for more authentic relationships with the public around us.”

“Testing all the promises of democratization in the blockchain space against reality” was something Ruth had been wanting to do ever since Furtherfield board member Rhea Myers started “issuing provocations on decentralized autonomous organizations that were impossible to ignore, long before the NFT boom.” To her, blockchain may not be essential to making cultural democracy happen. But Ruth feels it’s important to keep the spirit of DIY experimentation alive for this generation of the internet so blockchain isn’t only used for financial extraction. Hypha’s Co-Creation Lab gives organizations like Furtherfield the expertise they need to safely explore these possibilities.