Art has always been central to our approach since the very beginning, even somewhat intertwined with funding. As in fact covered in the first article published here - we looked to create an NFT collection that illustrated what we stood for and the problems we saw ourselves tackling.

There were two sides to the collection; The Dark Forest that was derived from very dark monocultural plantation forestry and the more joyful Living Breathing part. To create them we sifted through a library of famous trees from around the world. Took those images and brought them to life. Using a kaleidoscopic type filter and mirroring the image to create symmetry, they were then kind of animated by adding the pulsating effects you can feel that are meant to be like breathing.

This was all done during the height of the NFT era where monkey pics went for 100’s of Ethereums. It was with some consternation that we realised many people were not interested in their JPEG’s having any further function than selling it on to the next guy.

We explored how to imbue tokens with a deeper significance anyway through projects like Schrödinger’s Undeliverable Future Derivatives that sought to ensure tokens were legally bound back to the real world assets that they purported to represent, as the title alluded to there is somewhat of a challenge in marrying the physical and digital realm in a satisfying way, especially when dealing with moveable objects such as art. We also contributed in small ways to new token standards and research papers such as Wanderer Above a Sea of FUD: the cultural workforce, crypto anarchism, intellectual rights and blockchain-based funding models for culture and arts.

As a whole this was an interesting time for the blockchain space that brought many, many new people into the industry which ultimately culminated with the Brown Backpack Guy incident and market forces prevailing to the downside. Some projects raised significant amounts of capital to take meaningful conservation action, buying forests with the proceeds of their NFT sales .

Projects like Terra0 by Finger Prints DAO stand out as remarkable projects from around that time which are still doing interesting things to this day. Our own token collections never actually did much yet unfortunately. We started down a much more scientific route that involved using frickin’ lasers to make very detailed, incredibly accurate digital models that would be capable of predicting fire risks and doing all kinds of analytics, telling us the tree species and more.

We had some grand aspirations for the visual display of quantitive information but absolutely no means of obtaining the dense laser dot clusters that we would need to build these models. This is where a lack of funding was important to recount - what would we have done - bought a forest, shot lasers at it and hired an agency to build an incredibly intricate website we had imagineered? Our foundation is much stronger now than it would have been.

We also started consulting with a university project at some point that was purporting to try and do some interesting things with mushrooms and recycling. We listened carefully to the criteria which were somewhat tricky to apply to blockchain, designed mechanisms that were sufficiently restrictive to prevent the product being used for speculation. We were assured there would be funding for us but they somehow managed to burn down the bus they were putting the plastic recycling equipment into - presumably it was an accident.

So, these were some of the lengths that we went to try fund more visits to properties, cover legal fees and other expenses not sated by sweat equity. Before long we came across this new and wondrous funding machine called Artizen where we finally felt that old blockchain spirit, that wasn’t insular but outward looking.

From Giveth to Octant and even Gitcoin the funding space has lots to offer but nothing like the anarchic confetti cannon powered Artizen platform. Founded by the inimitable René Pinnell it’s been a remarkable journey to develop. Sprung from the need he saw first hand for funding cultural and artistic project creators. Highly recommend you listen to his story of persistence and sheer determination. Artizen is constantly innovating and evolving in real time which is amazing to see - they test in prod fr fr.

We like the slightly more curated approach to the projects that it platforms for funding. There is a voting round where projects communities can vote to ensure that their project proceeds to the next round - we are currently in need of votes if you are reading this. The funding round invites projects to actually pitch what they are doing and offer benefits to their backers.

During Season Four we offered postcards from this incredible library of 19th century botanical drawings we have to try and engage more of a community to come together and back the project. We thought they were pretty cool and did a handful of them, but maybe they were kind of crap after all. One of our landlords even offered a stay in their spectacularly well appointed B&B as a prize which we are hoping to rollover to the next round seeing as we only had a few buyers this time.

The match funding comes from various projects from across the Ethereum landscape from Filecoin to Juicebox and others, the kind of services we like to use anyway.

Our approach for Season Five is going to be a lot different and much less reliant on people already in the space. We are issuing a series of reports for public places around Ireland that we have already gotten to know a little bit through our development and ask people accessing the reports to back our work.

We can be happy with where we ended up. Creating these amazing reports and getting to learn all about the unique ecology of different areas all around the country.