Bright Moments Founder Seth Goldstein in Conversation with Fakewhale

Fakewhale: The choice to operate Bright Moments as a DAO is also key to the project. What inspired this decision, and in what ways has it influenced the organization’s trajectory and its community dynamics?

Seth Goldstein: I was tired of traditional venture capital finance, and the trickle down economics that it fostered.  Traditional startups are encouraged to make big long term bets, raise a two-year runway, and fill out the organization accordingly.  Modern venture portfolio theory assumes that 60% of the investments will fail, 30% will flounder, and 10% will succeed wildly and pay for the rest.  I did not want to raise money, nor did I want to pay lawyers to create complex stock agreements and option plans.

I had been aware of DAOs for a few years since the emergence of Ethereum smart contracts first enabled them, and given our focus on NFTs the “product” it felt only right to choose a crypto-native form of organization.  That being said, there were no best practices that I was aware of in terms of tokenizing a real-world operating team.  And so I simply minted 10 million ERC-20 tokens that were called “BRT” and used these as a means of organizing the evolution of our nascent gallery.  In April 2021, we started meeting Tuesday and Thursdays at 11a in the gallery for “circle meetings,” where we would take turns talking about ideas and plans for upcoming gallery shows.  As artists, developers, and experts from the local community started to get involved, we used these tokens as a way of rewarding eachother for participation.

In July of 2021, we started to use these tokens, which were not available anywhere other than our wallet, as a means of geo-fencing our IRL minting of CryptoVenetians.  The value of these CryptoCitizens started to rise, and soon we had two different tokenized communities– one based on the DAO BRT token, and the other based on the growing community of Citizen NFTs.  Working with the DAO whisperer Aaron Wright, we converted all 10 Million BRT tokens into a new “city” of 1,000 NFTs called CryptoGalacticans. This enabled us to shift the DAO membership entirely to NFTs, where every one of the 10,000 Citizens would have an equal vote.

We have built out the DAO based on these live CryptoCitizen mints, 1,000 at a time in a different city around the world over the course of three years.  There is no other form of ownership, governance or influence, other than these underlying NFTs, whose 45 x 45 pixels have all been generated on-chain.

Fakewhale: Given the fast-paced evolution of the digital art landscape, where do you foresee the scene heading in the upcoming years? Are there specific trends, technologies, or innovations that you’re particularly enthusiastic about or believe will significantly impact the future of digital collectibles?

Seth Goldstein: The obvious answer is AI, but that’s like talking about “e-commerce” in the late 90’s; it was starting to impact so many different industries that the term itself became useless.  So, yes, AI is going to impact the creation, curation, and collection of digital art in all sorts of ways.  It will be interesting to see how human agency gets established and communicated up and down the value chain.  This is likely where the blockchain will play a key role in terms of authenticating provenance, although the AI models themselves are so large and evolving so quickly that it is hard to put them on-chain to close the loop. The Botto project is a good example of how fungible tokens can be used to govern the creation of non-fungible AI artworks.  Fellowship.xyz and CyborgDAO are two projects that I am spending more time on.

The more subtle answer has to do with how we buy, sell and mint tokens.  Increasingly, fewer clicks are required.  What used to require us to go down through a series of authorizations and signatures now feels like moving up towards us.  Over the last months we have seen how the Farcaster open transaction system, frames, and its native currency, $degen, has facilitated faster and cheaper voting, reading and viewing experiences.  This is where the artists naturally flow, just as they do to cheap rents in urban landscapes.  At the last minute before Bright Moments Paris we organized a collaboration between Zancan, Coinbase and Highlight to issue a free mint Aux Arbres that would commemorate Coinbase’s new French license.  At 76,208 minted tokens, it is now the largest long-form gen art project, ever.

Fakewhale: In-person NFT minting is a groundbreaking concept that Bright Moments has pioneered. How do you believe this approach enriches the experience and perception of digital art among your audience?

Seth Goldstein: Only because of Covid had the concept of “IRL” become a unique product feature, even though the reality of humans being humans together is the oldest of commodities.

Since we first started live minting CryptoVenetians in Venice Beach in June 2021, we have gone on to live mint new communities in New York, Berlin, London, Mexico City, Tokyo and Buenos Aires. Along the way, we have designed a full range of IRL experiences – from a brutalist German power plant to a posh Mayfair boutique, from a white wall SoHo gallery to a festive Mexican courtyard, from a cyberpunk Shibuya skyscraper to a run down Argentinian theater. On one level, these are no different than minting tokens on your laptop in a cafe, but we have infused them with a narrative that fuses the tangible immediacy of a physical moment with the promise of on-chain permanence.

Memorability describes the future value of memory.  This is a key measure of any work of art; it is also, more broadly, the measure of Bright Moments.  Will we be remembered?  In many ways, the collection of 10,000 CryptoCitizens that were minted initially in Venice Beach by chance and then played out across the world over three years is a story meant to be told and retold.  Our city attributes are etched permanently on the blockchain, to be sorted and collected in sets that represent a full spectrum of our historical experiences.  There are subplots along the way in the form of live mints with 100 artists who each generated 100 outputs.

Fakewhale: As Bright Moments continues to establish itself in various global cities, including the recent expansion to Venice, how do you choose these locations, and what role do cultural differences play in shaping the art and experiences in each city?

Seth Goldstein: Our first cities (Venice Beach, New York and Berlin) were chosen centrally by the DAO.  After the success of the Venetians, the next choice was to head to New York City, which was a city that many of us knew well as the artistic hub in the United States.  We felt that the evolution from a sandy storefront in Venice to a proper SoHo gallery on Wooster Street would be a powerful signal.  Many of the generative artists we admired wanted to exhibit their work in New York.

After New York, we thought it was important to establish ourselves culturally, not just economically.  We decided to head to Berlin, where “poverty was sexy,” and anything that smacked of American cultural exceptionalism would get booed off the stage.  We sold two hundred Berlin Golden Tokens in advance and showed up at the monumental former power plant Kraftwek in November with the hope of booking the venue in the Spring.  Germany was still in the grips of Covid lockdown and so many traditional companies were shying away from future commitments.  We were fortunate to be able to rent the space, which provided us with a huge canvas on which to stage NFT Art Berlin.

After Berlin, we turned to the 4,000 Citizen holders in our DAO to choose our next cities.  Here are the on-chain snapshots that show the voting for each of the cities: