The Anarchiving Game

Demo

About

The problem it solves **The Anarchiving Game** tackles context creation for NFTs, fostering new forms of value and content discovery. Departing from **The Sphere**, an organization developing new funding and co-ownership models for the performing arts, the game serves as a participatory cryptomedia information catalog. It allows The Sphere's community to preserve, re-envision, and expand their collective memory and creative outputs. Invited participants - the **Anarchivists** - are empowered to create NFT constellations related to organizational journeys, reflecting collaborative innovation and decentralized decision-making. This non-linear catalog records a "state change" in organizational principles, where governance rituals are brought onchain. The game uses a Zora ERC-1155 contract, where anarchivists receive microgrants and are greenlisted as creators. Tokens share the same metadata structure, allowing for multiple visualizations and an evolving entity-relation graph. Through a wallet connector, users can collect and sort NFTs on the Zora Network. As the graph expands, it represents self-collecting digital tribes, supported by Zora’s protocol fee distribution system. In January 2024, we received a grant from **Serpentine’s Future Art Ecosystem** + **RadicalXChange** and started the development. For the Onchain Summer Buildathon, we enhanced UI/UX the structure itself, while preparing to onboard around 100 creators from our community: an emerging group of technologists, artists, curators, philosophers, founders, and collectors. At the Buildathon, we were also able to introduce a **/create** page within the game, reducing friction during the onboarding process. This new feature was possible thanks to the integration of Zora SDK within the repo. The activation of the game happens online (presentations and minting sessions), and IRL (through institutional events in cultural institutions), and through these activations we are able to gather valuable feedback from our community.

How it's made

Challenges we ran into ## Non-linear visualization of the Anarchive Traditional archives and NFT collections are often displayed as tables or grids, limiting dynamic interaction. We aimed to create a non-linear visualization for an evolving, interactive catalog. Using THREE.js and React Force Graph packages, we implemented a 3D graph visualization of the tokens' metadata, allowing users to explore the archive dynamically and engage with the project's content. ## Handling Reservoir's updates During our development, Reservoir underwent multiple breaking updates, requiring us to adapt. We learned about its dependencies - Wagmi, Viem, and TanStack Query - and deepened our understanding of web3 technologies for reading and writing smart contract data. As a solution, we stay updated with Reservoir's changes and integrate them with support from their team. ## Our very own /create page Changes on zora.co/create (the absence of attributes/properties options) challenged us to make a custom token creation page for a smooth onboarding experience. This was possible by using **Zora Protocol SDK**. We frequently posted questions in the ourzora/ocs-hackathon-24 repo and received feedback from Dan Oved, while also feed-forwarding suggestions, which led on Zora’s documentation page improvements. To complete the flow of our /create we decided to use @thirdweb-dev/storage package to manage the upload of media, image thumbnails, and token metadata to IPFS before new token creation - all of this developed during the buildathon. ## Feedback and scaling During the buildathon, we gathered important feedback from our community during an IRL event that took place at Karuna Pavilion, in Berlin. Whilst challenging, this *test in prod* approach enlightened us to the potentialities of our project, as we started to onboard the first Anarchivists from our network (BethMcCarthy and Alessando Y. Longo). To scale our operations, more of these institutional frameworks will be scheduled during the *Summer of Anarchiving*.