Creating art and community, going against the grain since day one.
Interview with Judy Mam and Bea Ramos, founders of dada.art, originally published on MORROW collective medium page
DADA is a collaborative art platform where people worldwide speak through drawings and creative collaboration, resulting in participatory works. It is a decentralized community committed to building a blockchain token economy for the arts. The 2017 launch of “Creeps & Weirdos” an NFT project and collection containing 108 unique pieces created by 30 platform artists, established DADA’s position among the pioneers of crypto art.
Judy Mam and Bea Ramos, the founders of the movement talked to MORROW about the roots of DADA, the Creeps & Weirdos collection and the Invisible Economy that they are creating.
Bea Ramos and Judy Mam, co-founders of dada.art. London, 2018. Courtesy of Judy Mam.
by Anna Seaman
Anna Seaman: Please share the story of how DADA began…
Bea Ramos: In the very beginning the mission was always the same — to empower artists so they could live from their art. DADA was a community for artists to share their work with others and to find connections.
Judy Mam: It was Bea’s idea to do something that went against conventional wisdom. It was a time when social media was exploding and she decided to create a horizontal platform for people to have visual conversations. People would post a drawing and others would reply with drawings.
AS: Did you feel anti-establishment? Like the original Dada movement after WW1 in Europe?
JM: We did feel the values of that movement were close to our hearts and to what we wanted to achieve. It was a continuation of complete experimental freedom for artists to express themselves. It was like an exquisite corpse in reverse because you see the first drawing, then you answer to that drawing — almost like an improvised music jam because it is completely spontaneous.
BR: There was this idea that anyone can make art; not everyone is an artist, but everyone can make art. We wanted artists not to make commercial stuff but we wanted them to just be themselves. That is the link with Dadaism in a sense of the execution, we wanted the absurd irrational stream of consciousness expression rather than technique and sleekness. I think Dadaism turned 100 years old in 2016. It was interesting to me that the original Dadaists were responding to war and to capitalism and how they saw that capitalist society was responsible for the war. By 2016 it wasn’t so much about wars, it was about economics. It was about capitalism, and late stage capitalism and that is what is at the heart of our DADA.
AS: Did you avoid economics then?
JM: When we started as a platform we went through start-up school and business models that considered charging artists a fee for participating, or selling advertising, but we felt that we could not put this kind of mechanics onto this amazing canvas that people were creating. We wanted it to be totally free to use and whatever people wanted to express to remain uncensored.
BR: We had a community that was so beautiful and doing these things for the sake of art and for the sake of the relationships, for the sake of the therapy and just feeling good about it. We couldn’t use any revenue models because it would destroy that.
Animalia, a visual conversation on dada.art.
AS: How did blockchain technology influence the project?
JM: In 2017, when we discovered blockchain, we decided to pivot and considered first creating a token and then a marketplace. It was very challenging because none of the business models for digital content and digital art were sufficient. When we discovered the blockchain it would have been easy to put a shopping cart icon on every drawing and tokenize every drawing but we knew it would destroy the community and the quality of the art.
BR: By 2018 we decided not to launch the token but instead go deep into the economic structure of tokenomics and we also decided not to continue the marketplace even though it was the first artists’ marketplace on Ethereum. We didn’t want to go into a speculative market. Instead, we went away for a year.
AS: What happened after that?
BR: Every drawing that was made on DADA since 2018 went straight to IPFS and we haven’t stopped working on blockchain since. But we didn’t follow everybody else’s trends, neither in NFTs nor in tokenomics nor in a DAO. The best way I can put it is that the technology is incredible and innovative but as people started taking the same economics and governance models and putting them on this new technology, they created the same speculative market. The result of this we saw in 2021.
What we were doing from the beginning was creating a decentralized community that should make economics invisible. That means radically separating what people are doing on the platform from everything that has to do with transactions. Some members of our community received more money in three or four years than they ever had in their lives but they never had to promote themselves. There are a lot of DADA artists who have nothing to do with NFTs and nothing to do with selling but continue to be super active on DADA, at times receiving benefits without ever having to sell anything.
DADA’s first tokenized collection, Creeps & Weirdos, minted October 5, 2017.
AS: Please explain the The Creeps & Weirdos collectibles project.
JM: Creeps & Weirdos was inspired by the Rare Pepes and the Cryptopunks, which had just been launched a couple of months before.The artworks were created on our drawing platform by 30 artists. From the Rare Pepes, we got the inspiration for the dank style that early collectors liked. They were mostly developers, people with crypto to burn, and early adopters who were excited to be able to spend their ETH on a real use case. From the Cryptopunks we adapted their collectible structure with different levels of scarcity and created a decentralized marketplace for rare digital art made by artists on Ethereum. “Rare art” is what we used to call NFTs in those days.
It was so early that you could reach out to the biggest experts in blockchain art at the time and they would not only answer immediately but compare notes and learn from each other because everything was new. Matt and John from Larva Labs generously allowed us to modify the Cryptopunks smart contract. We did this by coding royalties into the smart contracts on-chain for the first time in NFT history. A hybrid of art and collectibles was born. C&W were not trading cards, memes, avatars, or a game. They were actual art, digitally handmade by artists on our platform, and they paved the way for all the current crypto art marketplaces. We have seen all of them blossom since.
AS: How is that different from a speculative market?
BR: Back then it was very far away from the mentality of the speculative market because we did two things: one was royalties for artists, the other was that a percentage of sales went to a fund for the DADA community, not for the company. That way, with ‘Invisible Economy’ principles, we created an ecosystem where all of the value comes from all of the contributions by different people: not just from the artists but from researchers, computer scientists, curators, the marketing team, and the technology team. This philosophy enabled us to recapture the value from the sales of the C&W in the bull market of 2021 to make it exponentially bigger by “rescuing” the Creeps so that DADA would be the majority holder and so that bots would not sweep them. This effort was led by a computer scientist, our token economist, Sebnem Rusitschka, and Lenara Verle, who is very involved in the Invisible Economy. When you think about it, the contributions that were made by the artists on the platform plus this other group of people took the original value of the art to the blockchain and created more value.
JM: We are going against the current and it hasn’t been easy. The way we operate is that we have a community, people are working for DADA, adding value because they want to participate without expecting remuneration.
AS: Looking back, how do you feel now about what you did back then and what is happening now in the digital art market?
JM: It was very clear in 2017 that we were really early and we had to make very hard decisions — all to protect the community. It was an amazing community and we had to continually make decisions not to raise VC money to grow it. We felt that if we were going to grow it, we would break it. With the Invisible Economy it’s the same thing, nobody understands it, probably people will understand it in 10 years. Now, it is extremely hard because we are creating something totally different that has never existed before. I feel now the less we interact with the market the more satisfying and rewarding it is. As soon as we get close to the market, we get burned out by its conflict. We have become wiser and double down on what we believe.
BR: I do have a pessimistic view of blockchain and the NFT market but I am very optimistic about what we are doing, and as Judy said, we will continue to double down. We are reaching a critical point, we are probably getting closer to distribution sustainability. Once we have that it will be transformative to show how other ways are possible.
This editorial is part of a series of essays and interviews contextualizing MORROW collective’s {R(Evolutionaries);} project, exhibition and sale commemorating a decade of blockchain art. Launched at Art Dubai Digital 2024 and brought to market in collaboration with SuperRare and Sotheby’s.
For more info www.morrow-collective.com/revolutionaries