Artizen Is Helping Fund Human Creativity In A Digital World
Web3 is powering a new way to raise capital for a multitude of creative projects
What constitutes “art?” For René Pinnell, co-founder of Artizen, art is anything created that helps move society forward in a positive direction.
By employing a large scope to define what art is and can be, Pinnell hopes to use Artizen to fund human creativity in all its forms, with the idea that creativity can blossom in a variety of different sectors outside traditional artistic realms and can thus propel social change in new and different ways.
“At its most basic level, Artizen is a platform to help creative people raise money for creative projects,” Pinnell said in an interview. “We think an artist is a creator, we think a scientist is a creator, we think coders are creators. Anybody who produces something new that didn’t exist before is a creator, and we believe directionally that it’s always good to fund creativity in the world. Creativity is the superpower that humans have for problem solving.”
According to Pinnell, for all of the big problems we face as a civilization—the solutions are there—it just takes creative people thinking in new and different ways to uncover the answers.
One way Artizen is helping creators solve problems that give birth to new ideas and creations is through the sale of Cultural Artifacts from their projects on the Artizen platform. If a creator is in the early stages of development on a project, they might sell some early concept art or sketches—or if it’s a scientific research project, perhaps a photograph of a formula they wrote when they had a breakthrough.
The Cultural Artifacts are then sold in the form of nonfungible tokens (NFTs) to fans, family, friends, and supporters—anyone who believes in the project and wants to see it come to fruition.
From Artizen’s web site
“That mechanism is how creators unlock match funding—the more Artifacts they sell, the more match funding Artizen provides the project,” Pinnell said. “The big bet is that Artifacts represent a new type of investment vehicle. For the projects that have a big impact in the world of art, science, or technology, the idea is that the Artifact will appreciate in value and become more valuable in proportion to how much real world impact that project has.”
Pinnell, who has a background in fundraising, understands it’s very difficult to know how much impact a project really has in the world. That’s why he believes Artizen’s Cultural Artifacts will be able to accurately reflect the real world impact of a project over time.
“Take carbon credits or any kind of project that’s aiming to have a beneficial ecological impact,” he said. “All of those projects struggle with the problem of quantifying impact. If a project hasn’t had any impact, the Artifact probably isn’t going to be worth much. If the Artifact is worth a whole lot, it means there is a group of people who really believe the project is significant.”
He continued, “We’ve seen this throughout history. Why is Leonardo da Vinci’s manuscript worth millions of dollars? It’s because he revolutionized art and science. The cultural artifact of his manuscript where he was jotting down his rough ideas is tremendously valuable because he had real world impact and changed the course of history. It’s a pretty flexible phenomenon that has been underutilized in assessing how much impact a creator has had on the world.”
Read more: Ecosapiens Battle Climate Change by Offering Carbon Credits as NFTs
In the current system, creators submit to The Artizen Fund and projects are voted on by current Artifact holders. The more Artifacts you own, the more voting power you have, and the projects that are ranked the highest are then curated for official selection.
Once projects are in the official selection, each project sells an Artifact in an open edition. Over the course of the season – it’s in its third season – the number of Artifacts a project sells becomes the total supply—so a project could sell one or it could sell 100.
“We like this model because it allows us to price the Artifacts pretty affordably—.01 ETH right now, which is around $25-$30 with gas fees—allowing most people to give support to a project and get some ownership stake,” Pinnell said. “It also allows for the intensity of your belief to be played out more.”
Pinnell also thinks the current model allow more people to participate in future curations because the more Artifacts people are able to buy—and the more broadly distributed they are—the more voices and perspectives can come to bear when reflecting future projects for funding.
In this way, Artizen is adopting the “Angel” model of hedging bets, investing in art and creators in nominal amounts across the board, and if one takes off, it covers everything.
“Right now, an Artifact is a gif, jpg, or movie file, but I think it should really be any media asset,” Pinnell said. “For instance, it could be a 3-D object that could be imported into other metaverse games. Because NFTs and Artifacts are a thing that you own, it allows other people to build games, platforms and apps on top of them. My hope is that there would be other tools and services that would be built for the fans and collectors of a specific project who buy the Artifact, or tools and apps that help creators manage their communities.”
When it comes to communities, Pinnell is of the mindset that smaller is better.
“I’m super happy with small group interactions, period, full stop,” he said. “I think you get a lot more value out of that and I think it’s a great place to grow from.”
He shared that Artizen had a fairly robust Discord community of a couple thousand people—with fair engagement—but it became noisy and difficult to know who the creators of substance were—those there for the right reasons—versus those just there to hustle their stuff.
“It was kind of a messy place with an imbalanced ratio of high-quality and low-quality interactions, so we decided to kill our Discord and launch a new community platform with a friend’s app called Console—which is basically a web3 Discord killer,” he said. “You have to own an Artifact in order to join it, so it’s very, very gated.”
He continued, “It’s small right now—there’s about 450 Artifacts in the wild owned by 100-150 people, and of that, 36 people have joined the Console community—and of that, you know everyone there is either an investor, a serious NFT collector, or artist who’s done major work.”
The idea moving forward is that the Artizen digital community will continue to grow organically and support projects that have real world impact. To that end, the company asks only four questions when people submit projects: What are you making? What impact do you want to have in the world? Why are you the right team to do it? How much progress have you made?
“We live in the real world and all projects ought to have real world impact, even if it’s happening mostly in the digital realm,” Pinnell said. “Whatever interaction is happening in the digital realm ought to be focused on transforming and improving people’s lives for the better.”