In our first exposé, we provided some essential definitions and references for the concept of the pluriverse. The origins of Pluriverse.wtf can be traced back to a mutually enriching collaboration between RaidGuild ⚔️ and Gitcoin, culminating in the creation of a comic book that sought to complicate the vexing and knotty concept of Moloch. Then came a second comic that elaborated the nightmarish virtuality of our existential prisoner’s dilemma in excrutiating, eye quivering detail. Now we want to share with you a few more nuances and inspirations that inform this diaphanous “web3 protocol with no protocol” and how we continue to weave the cosmic tapestry into novel fabrics of contemplation, once more with feeling.
Moloch is a vacuous receptacle, a strobing signifier for the failures of community-centric and public goods-oriented frameworks that, if surmounted, would enable us to transcend our inherently adversarial nature and demonstrate our collective capacity to make sense of the cascading consequences stemming from our self-interested actions, harmonizing them with the common good. The aim of the Pluriverse is to effectively disseminate several ideas shared by both RaidGuild and Gitcoin, et al, including the general imperative to prioritize regenerative strategies over degenerative, extractive, and intrinsically unsustainable economic delusions. We speculate that in order to achieve this feat, we would need to harness a reciprocal exchange with the hearts and minds of the Ethereum community. While pursuing this goal, we also seek to elevate the psychological complexity of our storytelling, generating new prospects for immersion in the ways our artifacts are fashioned, infusing with deep mythopoetic significance and meaning.
The original impetus was to elaborate “solarpunk” lore. Solarpunk, a purportedly Reddit-spawned phenomena that has since been circulated through the web3 community with greater and lesser sincerity, is widely regarded as an aesthetic movement that espouses a vision that is often juxtaposed with the darker, psychologically shadowed lunarpunk. These movements, in turn, have evolved out of a cypherpunk milieu that continues to spawn myriad pseudo-punk stylizations in the fractaline sprawl Twitter-pated echo chambers and brownian noise-filled Discord servers. Finding this binary deeply dissatisfying, the pluriverse crew frames solarpunk as a part of a deep, primordial, and portentous historical trajectory, though not necessarily in the manner typically explicated. We trace the creative antecedents of punk in the origins of Surrealism, Dada, Situationism, and Fluxus, those high-water islands of an otherwise self-obsessed century of Eurocentric art production. We are at once inspired and daunted by the ideological momentum of 20th-century propagandistic techniques, anti-pop cultural collage, subversion tactics, manifestos, and absurdist games of these movements. Our goal is now to confound the solar/lunar "punk" dichotomy, fashioning art and technology into a patchwork quilt that invites all androids to dream of novel electric ungulates.
By adopting an agile approach to lorecraft, we can transcend the limiting confines of our initial ideas, testing and refining them as they take flight. Agile imagination design techniques embody the cyclical, iterative nature of experimentation, rapid prototyping, and frequent feedback loops. This approach invites flexibility, risk-taking, and continuous learning. A rapid prototyping process allows for a more playful and experimental approach to creation, freeing the creative mind from the paralyzing pressure of getting everything perfect the first time around. The ultimate aim of agile imagination design is to foster a highly adaptive, inventive mindset capable of envisioning and realizing novel worlds.
The pluriverse is a fluxing, alchemical process of transmutation, where the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are constantly shifting and taking new forms. We remain ever-mindful of the emergent collective ethnography of web3 concretions that surround us, yet we are driven by the distinctly hallucinatory set of vision and values that exhorts us to free our minds and souls from the shackles of orthodoxy and embrace the unbounded possibilities of the unknown and unknowable. Rather than relying on an overtly didactic approach to disseminating knowledge, we have sought to harness the power of vivid imagery and impressionistic storytelling to evoke visceral reactions in our readers.
We realized that the production of graphic novels alone could not satisfy our lofty ambitions. As such, we endeavored to expand our storytelling repertoire to encompass a variety of transmedia forms imbued with philosophical depth. We proposed a novel scheme to incentivize a group of musicians to engender a concept album, recognizing that music is the lingua franca of the universe pluriverse. Here we are asking what it means to bypass the rational mind and penetrate directly into the amygdala and the cerebellum with sonic soliloquy, extending telekinetic conduit for transducing the essence of the manifold technical concepts into a poetic expression. We brought together a coterie of extraordinary artists - Curtis Tamm, Cameron Stevens, and Maneesh Raj Madahar - who, although not previously acquainted with the pluriversal philosophies or underlying web3 concepts, have successfully crafted a distinctive sonic experience that will surely titillate our collective imagination and invite novel interpretations of the emergent multi-act hyperobject of the decentralized internet for all and sundry.
The other facet of this multi-dimensional project is centered around the use of visual art. Our aim was to begin from the tangible, the corporeal, and work our way back to the digital. Artist Billy Sprague was invited to help us increase the fidelity of the pluriverse, to create a vivid, palpable vision that optimizes for ocular titillation. At the outset we pondered: what correlations exist between uncanny melodies and visceral collages within the realm of web3? As the project set out to provide a sanctuary for visionaries, Sprague responded by generating time, space, stillness, and seclusion in his work, to spawn a reflective mirror to reverberate our gaze back at us. His images regard the material world as an interface, a threshold bridging the liminal realms of thought and action. Our chief impetus is to trigger our audience to ask profound questions, to scrutinize what we have offered, to attempt to impart significance to the ineffable, and to inquire how we might infuse this curiosity into our pragmatic technological designs.
In an uncertain yet highly specific sense, one might say that we set out to perform a spectacular failure. In the realm of art, failure is to be embraced and celebrated. The greater the failure, the richer the bounty of wisdom gleaned. Failure is not an endpoint, but a call to reorient ourselves towards new potentials and possibilities. As we engage in this dance with the unknown, we recognize that the act of experimentation and collaboration across disciplines is an act of success in and of itself. The fruits of this project may not be solely measured by sales or distribution figures, for our triumph is already writ large across the cosmos in the execution of the unexpected and unquantifiable.
In the forthcoming article, we shall converse with the artists themselves, allowing for a more intimate and personal exposition of their journey in this project. Stay tuned, stay tuning!