Decentralized AI commons for live arts (The Sphere)

Cosmos Institute granted Erik Bordeleau on September 10, 2024 as part of the inaugural Cosmos Ventures cohort, with funding in the $1K to $10K range. Bordeleau is a philosopher and media theorist based at NOVA University in Lisbon and affiliated with the Art, Business and Culture Center at the Stockholm School of Economics; his published work spans political philosophy, contemporary art, world cinema, blockchain cultures, and finance.

The Sphere is a web 3.0 research-creation project Bordeleau co-directs with the artist duo Saloranta and De Vylder. Public material describes a three-axis architecture. The first axis is the Anarchive, a process-oriented digital repository of artistic works and fragments that functions as a commons rather than a static archive; an associated Anarchiving Game is implemented as a shared contract on the Zora network that lets contributors mint, share, and collect fragments tied to the project's creative trajectory. The second axis is a contributive accounting system for collaboration inside decentralized open-value networks, intended to track and credit contribution within performing-arts collectives. The third axis is a cryptoeconomic interface developed in collaboration with Curve Labs that handles liquid ownership and dynamic governance over the commons.

The thesis underneath is that live performance art is structurally disadvantaged under current AI training and copyright regimes. Performances are often ephemeral, undocumented, non-commercial, and held outside the corpora that frontier models train on, which means an AI commons for the live arts has to be assembled deliberately rather than scraped, and a funding model has to compensate the contributors who make that assembly happen. The Sphere sits at the sovereignty-decentralization meta-layer of the open-source AI stack with the data layer as secondary attribution, because the question it answers is who owns and governs a small, curated, non-Common-Crawl corpus.