teia.cafe is currently looking for people to test out our new dApp on Tezos! Known issues:

• teia.cafe is using a hybrid system that leverages both public IPFS and private server systems to handle content delivery. It has worked well in local environments but reliability varies wildly depending on region and we need more feedback from users in all parts of the world. (As always: teia.cafe does not track your data! All transactions are handled on-chain and uses public data only.)
• To include a wide variety of content, a large number of discovery queries were created but there hasn't been enough time to test all of them yet. The "experiential" side of these features are subjective, but we're nonetheless interested in getting feedback from users about first-impressions, and whether or not you feel like they're working "properly". Particularly true for the experimental features such as True Random🔀 and the Burn Pile🔥 .
• Both teia.cafe and the Teia community itself is open to support for new and less supported formats. If you think there's an underrepresented medium that ought to have a channel for showcasing, feel free to suggest them at any time. (I'm already working on trying to get MIDI files as part of mintable collections.)
• Works from Hic et Nunc (HEN) and Teia were minted under the same contract so there is not a clear-cut division between the two names, even with individual works. Most people agree that the "transition" happened around early 2022', but you may see some overlap between the two. (The Teia DAO token drop is due to happen in the fall of 2023' so this story is still unfolding - the DAO is likely where a lot of these issues will get discussed and hopefully resolved.)

Why Playlists? The Universal Media Player

This project originally was inspired by HEN Radio - a project from the heydays of Hic et Nunc that arguably was producing the best online music anywhere at the time. (Yes, anywhere - the HEN Radio v2 is a homage to that project and largely contains most of the same content from back then.) HEN Radio had high quality music and audio but had trouble getting attention because of its small size and reliability issues that it weren't able to solve before the market pulled out - and now unfortunately sits mostly idle.

Nonetheless - during the course of the project we realized - why stop at audio? Why not have a player that "plays" literally everything - including niche and esoteric formats that questions the definition of "art" itself. So out of that idea, the "Universal Media Player" was born.

The "playlist" format itself, however, we realized had potential because it's something that curators needed anyway - whenever you go to an art event or showcase, it's actually very rare to have only 1 work on display. Art curation is usually done by collections - often with mixed ownership, authorships, with each work often having complex partnership and deal-flows of their own.

During most of the NFT events that I attended last year, I noticed that curators, artists, and event planners were doing all of this stuff manually - often with spreadsheets, power-points, video editors...and in one case, I distinctly remember a frustrated artist printing out their work's information and QR code on a piece of paper then taping it directly to the TV screen so people could see. 🤣

Having a simple of list of works minted on-chain secures the validity of each item while also accurately tracking what's going on - which can often become very complex, especially for professional deal-flows. This was the sort of problem that the blockchain was designed to solve, which is applied here in a format we might be familiar with - the "playlist".

teia.cafe's "Phase 2" will include curator commissions and referral networks to hopefully incentivize more economic activity, but the playlist is the necessary foundation in which to start building bigger and better things on top of. For now, though, it still has some value in that 1) you can store and retrieve your playlists from anywhere in the world at any time for any reason and 2) minting your tastes on-chain using your personal wallet makes a very public "statement" to the world that is a stronger signal than Web2's "likes", which in itself contains no economic value. It is from this "statement" that teia.cafe is building its social graphs on top of.

"Hands Off"

Before we go too deep, though, I think it's important to mention that teia.cafe attempts to take a very "hands-off" approach to curation - the majority of NFT platforms during the 21'-22' bull run focused on minting as its primary activity, but later struggled with how to deliver said content to audiences out there. With literally millions and millions of NFTs out there, how does one know which work will resonate with which audience?

Most Web3 curatorial approaches tend to fall under a few categories: 1) sales/money based leaderboards, 2) popularity metrics (views/likes), or 3) manually selected works based on whomever happens to be working there. While there isn't anything wrong with these methods in themselves, the problem is that none of these methods seem to be working to convert views into actual sales over time.

I think that manual curation can work, assuming that the curator is incredibly organized and happens to be tuned into the zeitgeist of their time - which requires a bit of luck and an enlightened approach that leverages their position as the "curator" in an effective and powerful way. To be perfectly frank - I don't really have any interest in playing that role nor being the gatekeeper/arbiter of "good taste" - so the approach for teia.cafe was to be "hands-off" and let the people themselves decide what they like. In phase 1, we plan to rely on randomization to de-bias the results - in phase 2, we will let the people themselves decide what they like by incentivizing them to curate towards their own tastes.

Ok - now onto the main thrust - the social aspects of digital artworks, using the theory of relativity (yes, the one with space and time) as the hypothesis for experimentation going forward. This is the section where the article will start to get a little "out there" - to the moon, perhaps? 🌌

Space-Time Networking

Due to the theory of relativity, we have, for a while now, known that space and time are intrinsically related to each other - if not literally made up of the same stuff. The details of the physics itself is not really relevant here (I'm not a scientist by any stretch), except for the basic idea that the concepts of space and time are related to us in a very deep way, even if we might not be able to understand its effects in a consciously.

What does this have to do with NFTs? Well, when organizing the information around NFTs there's all kinds of data we can get from each work - the format, color, subject matter, whatever the artist added as keywords, description and titles, etc. What does this tell us about the artwork, how "good" it is, or who might like it? I've been studying art and art history pretty much my whole life but honestly, a lot of that stuff is subjective so I really have no clue. But we do know that there is at least is one data point that is always objective: time. (⌛⌚🌌)

The gist of the slider above is that you start from where you "are", which includes recent items and people/works you're already familiar with, then branch out from there. One obvious "path" is the past - which encourages the user to look at history - the other is exploration, which deliberately pushes the user into looking at works they're less familiar with. I think that part of the challenge of why social graphs are so difficult is because most models don't account for the fact that most people do both things - sometimes simultaneously - depending on where they are in life and what their mood happens to be. This model was created as a way to account for both mindsets and let the user decide what's appropriate for them at the time.

Details aside - at its core, this experiment rests on one big assumption - that if you and someone else happens to like the same artwork, there is something happening there that is deeper than just keyword matches alone. So our job is to make sure that the connection is made, but stay "hands-off", otherwise.

Roadmaps

As mentioned earlier, Phase 2 is where we wrap our playlists with commission-based sales, which is where we expect most of the usage and growth to come from - ideally, everyone who mints a playlist on our platform will at least have the potential to make back their money easily - assuming that's what they want. In the meantime, however, we want our playlists to be still have some value to users out there in the form of improved presentation and the value that comes with connecting to people of similar tastes.

That's how most of the world works, and has worked as long as people can remember, after all.