The Beat

Welcome to The Beat, Decential’s weekly exploration of music, culture and the new Internet – featuring all the friends we’ve met along the way.

On the culture-tech byway, things move at breakneck speeds. From web3 to AI, copyright to collective ownership, art to psychedelics, The Beat is an exercise in association. We all contain multitudes, and within them, vast differences. But there is some connective, fundamental essence to be found.

The Beat is dedicated to that essence, and to the people who seek it; the rest, as Alex Ross wrote, is noise.

The Seeds of Our Future

Happy New Year, Beat readers! Thank you for spending time in this little corner of the Internet. I deeply appreciate you lending me your ear for a few minutes a week.

I’m spending these holidays in Spain. As I write this, I’m about 30 miles east of Málaga, looking across a valley at the Tejeda Mountains. Surrounding me is Mediterranean scrubland. It’s one of my favorite landscapes – desert-like but green, teeming with olive trees, rosemary bushes, aloe plants and various cacti. All day, the sun shines and the birds sing.

Year's end is ripe for reflection, so I’m limiting my stimulation – aside from a few companions, card games and the invigorating tour de force that is the natural world. That means no news. Beyond this side of the Tejedas, I don’t really know what’s going on – and what a reprieve that is.

Still, I am writing, and spending time with the thoughts of folks I’ve interviewed recently. In their words, I’m finding hope, and I’m realizing the Beat of late has been a bit doom and gloom. I’ve written Elon Musk’s name too many times, so as we look ahead to 2025, I’m rallying behind that hope, so that it may become the seeds of our future.

Analivia Cordeiro

Just before the holiday, I spent an hour chatting with Analivia Cordeiro, a Brazilian dancer who trained with eminent choreographers like Merce Cunningham. She’s also a pioneering computer artist.

In 1973, when she was 18, Cordeiro spent a year working at the computer center at Brazil’s State University in Campinas. Using a PDP-11 with 5 MB of storage and 256 KB of memory, she made “M3X3,” a computer-programmed choreography for video – and Brazil’s first video art piece.

Cordeiro is the daughter of Waldemar Cordeiro, an Italian-born Brazilian artist who helped spearhead Latin America’s concrete art movement and early forms of computer art. During meals, he shared art with his young daughter. And in time, her father’s influences crept in.

“I love mathematics – I am not just a dancer,” she told me, speaking from her home in Brazil, where big windows revealed trees and the southern hemisphere’s summer sun. “I think ‘cultural people’ have such an interesting mind. They should go into the software.”

In the early 1980s, she expanded upon “M3X3,” working with the technologist Nilton Lobo to build Nota-Anna, one of the first notation softwares to graphically represent human motion in three dimensions. 

The duo has been developing the program ever since, leaning into the tool’s equalizing nature. “ It's not a figure or a personage you show, it’s a stick figure of points,” she said, explaining how the software graphically depicts the spatial displacement of 24 joints in the body. “Nobody knows if you are a woman, fat, thin, old, young – no, everybody is the same. It allows a dialogue that is pure movement, from equal to equal. It’s very democratic.”

As a counter to democratic ideals, Elon Musk’s name did arise in our conversation. Cordeiro painted him as a modern-day, technological representative of the censorship regime she first met at age 10, when Brazil’s military overthrew the government and began a 21-year dictatorship.

“People from the companies that propose softwares don't know the limitations they are imposing,” she said, describing the massive workforces laboring to realize Musk-like founder visions. “Technology imposes rules.

“From the very beginning of my life, I never accepted the impositions and the limitations. I know there are limitations – I take sometimes years to get the result because the technology is still not there, but technology will be there. And if [artists] actually begin to propose software, what happens? The technical solutions will be more complete.”

Patronage Nouveau

One of the most exciting things about web3 is that artists are building software. Take the artist Latashá Alcindor, who I covered in the August piece, “Latashá is Manifesting Her Way Out of the Matrix.”

Through her music and thought leadership, Alcindor earned influence in web3. She became the Head of Community at Zora – an artist-centric NFT protocol and marketplace – where she started an education program called Zoratopia. “I was getting DMs from artists about what I was doing,” she told me. “At that point the information we were gathering was so powerful for so many creatives.” 

To onboard artists to the space – and to fill a void in crypto for gatherings that were welcoming to people of color – she started organizing Zoratopia events at major crypto conferences. She brought in big names to perform, like TOKiMONSTA, Mick Jenkins and Vic Mensa. 

Alcindor was paving a new way forward to help artists “heal money wounds.” At the end of 2021, she tweeted a recap of her year’s NFT sales, which got progressively larger with each drop. The future seemed bright. And this, she wrote in her tweet, was just “the beginning.”

Soon after, the NFT market – and crypto at large – fell off a cliff. But it’s not dead. In fact, people are coming back. I’ve criticized the election-induced bull market, but a silver lining of more money in crypto is that there’s more money to spend supporting web3-native artists like Alcindor.

That’s a reality being proposed by C.Y. Lee, a name I’ve referenced often in my writing. He’s a patron of projects like Supercollector, SCENES and Network Archives. Lee’s intention, he told me, is “to foster a culture where fans enthusiastically support independent artists via new forms of patronage.”

In Network Archives, Lee wrote a piece titled “Patronage is a Luxury Project.” He traces patrons back to the 16th century and the Medici family – who supported Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Donatello, Botticelli, Galileo, Machiavelli... One need only imagine a world without those names to understand the cultural importance of patronage.

Now consider the state of platform capitalism, where business models exploit creators to the benefit of technologists. Surely, that wouldn’t be the case if artists were building the technology – or if patronage were a normalized act that liberated creators to simply be creative.

Via the Executive Producer role, Lee is now embarking on that path with Alcindor. I caught up with both of them recently. Stay tuned for a piece that proposes a modern-day reprisal of this centuries-old relationship, where artists can art and folks like Lee, in his words, “ can be a part of making the culture happen that [he] want[s] to see.”

Listening Parties

As a journalist in this space, I feel much the same. Where Lee can tap financial privilege to shape culture, I can tap curatorial prerogative – to draw eyes and ears to the resonance that lies beyond degens and memecoin casinos.

I’m grateful for Decential because its purview is not the money and the tech, but the people and the culture. I get to tell the stories that, hopefully, steel observers against dominant narratives of greed, and inspire builders to pursue more heartening inventions.

One of those recent projects was CC0lab, a group of 20 musicians, developers and visual artists from Songcamp’s third songwriting camp. The group’s creators use CC0 (the most liberal Creative Commons license) to waive all copyright and related rights – to better reflect the naturally memetic dynamics of the Internet.

I participated in the collective’s most recent minicamp, joining about a dozen other artists. We were all tasked with bringing “a handmade sample (voice, instruments, processed recordings, etc.)” to drop into the collective’s Discord chat. Other participants could then use them – or anything from the lab’s growing CC0 sample bank – to build a song.

When I offered to lend my voice, Celia Inside – an artist and this minicamp’s co-steward (alongside longtime CC0lab captain, Steph Essiambre) – sent me an instrumental track called “Reach,” which features a looping guitar riff with a handful of percussive elements.

I’m a solo singer-songwriter, so engaging with a musical foundation I didn’t build was challenging. In time, though, I found freedom in the detachment. I could be more playful and less precious, and the vocal part – which features both sung lyrics and spoken word – reflected that. It’s markedly different from my other music (and from Celia’s original version). 

The tracks will be released on-chain in early 2025. Conceptually, CC0 and blockchain are a match made in heaven. NFTs can track the usage of Creative Commons-licensed content and automatically distribute royalties to creators. The art moves with ease, and value accrues via the art’s cultural impact.

Last week, we used Discord to host a listening party and celebrate the end of the minicamp. The mixtape’s eight songs are a melange of sound, from glitchy darkness to tender lyricism – reflective of the diverse styles of the contributing artists.

While we listened to the tracks, there was a gush of support and encouragement – the chat was filled with fire emojis and gratitude.

Why? First and foremost, because the CC0lab container created an opportunity for us to make music together. The fact that the collective’s music is released on the artists’ terms has kept people collaborating in this container – even through the bear market. Because these technical solutions are more complete, and because in spaces like CC0lab, there’s an opportunity to make the culture we want to see.

And when I imagine these kinds of solutions not only enduring, but unfurling to every little corner of the Internet, I’m filled with hope.

Perhaps this is still just the beginning.

Coda

In this part of Spain, the mountains create a unique microclimate, giving the region about 300 days of sunshine every year. Before moving to London, I’d never experienced seasonal depression, and knowing that the dismal gray winter lies waiting upon my return, I’m soaking up every bit of sun, grateful for these climes that are buoying my spirits and turning my thoughts to hope.

These conditions are surely one reason Málaga is one of Europe’s oldest continuously inhabited cities, occupied since the Phoenicians arrived some 2,800 years ago. Since then, the Romans, the Visigoths, the Moors and many others have ruled these lands, but always there have been people, persisting in the hope that their labors will bear fruit, and that the sun will continue to shine.

Now go outside and listen to music – it’s a beautiful day.

My name is MacEagon Voyce. For more music and less noise, consider subscribing to The Beat. And if you already do, consider sharing with a friend. Thanks for being here.