Notes on Infrastructuring
Deprecation, infrastructural dependencies, or when codes meet bodies
Sphereans and Earthlings,
When tools expire and code molts, the practice persists breathing through new shells.
When dependencies deprecate, we refactor not just software but relations.
This issue sits with infrastructuring: code that meets bodies, and how we keep live art alive when the stack shifts underfoot.
1. The Karmetplace is back!
The Karmetplace is back online after several adjustments to its code structure. The reason for this intervention: one of the foundational components of our previous version was deactivated when Reservoir discontinued the software development kit we’d been relying on.
Rather than simply patching the system, this turned into an opportunity to reflect more deeply on what it means to architect, implement, and maintain web3 infrastructures for the arts. So we sat down with our two in-house artists-developers to unpack these questions. The result is this interview:
On Deprecation and Dependencies: a Conversation around Web3 Art Infrastructuring with Pedro Victor Brandão and Vitor Butkus
Protocol art demands hybrid practitioners: artists who can navigate GitHub repositories, write smart contracts, debug frontends shortcomings, and maintain on-chain infrastructures. Who responds when a Web3 chain pivots, leaving yet another quasi-instant digital ruin in its wake?
Pedro Victor Brandão has been involved in the Sphere from pretty much the beginning. He has been our in-house web3 wizard, extending his magic across all crypto-media affairs and beyond. In alliance with Vitor Butkus, he created uint studio, where they develop digital architectures enabling collective artistic experimentation. Since 2023, they’ve powered The Sphere, building and maintaining dApps like The Karmetplace and The Anarchiving Game.
This conversation with Pedro and Vitor explores what it means to operate as artists-engineers in an expanded web3 ecology: writing code that sets conditions for art, building platforms that sustain new solidarities, and treating infrastructuring itself as aesthetic practice in its own right.
You can read the full interview as a fragment in The Anarchiving Game or as a pinned IFPS PDF file
2. Lene’s talk at HFBK Hamburg’e event: Technologies of the Imagination – Crypto Currencies and Blockchain in Artistic Research
On Wednesday, 3 December 2025, Lene was at HFBK Hamburg (Kino) for an event titled “Technologies of the Imagination. Crypto Currencies and Blockchain in the Realm of Artistic Research.”
The evening looked at how cryptocurrencies and blockchain are deeply entangled with utopian imaginaries and counter-hegemonic politics. Beyond technical infrastructure, these systems generate communities, rituals and speculative models of governance – often organised around almost conversion-like moments of “orange-pilling,” where people come to see the world through a new economic and political lens.
She presented Swirls of Fortune (2025), a short musical sci-fi set in the metastable universe of The Sphere and guided by the entity Swirl. Bringing together cybernetic clowns, NPC choreographies and cascading financial scenes, the film treats economies as swirling, recursive systems rather than linear pipelines of extraction.
She situated the film within The Sphere’s broader protocol design, including Proof-of-Celebration, karmic objects and The Anarchiving Game, and reflect on how (crypto)currencies might be repurposed as media of collective memory, celebration and reflexive value, instead of instruments of accumulation.
The event also featured Samwel Moses Ntapanta and Steffen Köhn (Department of Visual Anthropology, Aarhus University), who will speak about their research on cryptocurrencies in the Global South using their film Proof of Work. The film follows Kenyan Bitcoin advocates Felix and Martin as they attempt to onboard 100 businesses, Uber drivers and Pentecostal churches in Nairobi to Bitcoin – a case study in Bitcoin as both a technological infrastructure and an ideological project.
Upcoming event:
ANARQUIVAR THE SPHERE: Práticas Fugitivas de Inteligência Coletiva
When: December 10th, 5 to 7pm
Where: Casa Ngira - Rua Benjamin Constant, 125 - Glória, Rio de Janeiro
It is such a pleasure to announce the South American premiere of Lene Vollhardt’s Swirls of Fortune (2025)! We are invited by the Quantumfagia project, which is about re-imagining solidary technofagia as it plays with matter, energy, and the information we exchange while revisiting the indigenous Tupinambá practice of devouring the enemy to absorb their power and generate something new. This conversation will be an opportunity to meet in person the co-directors of The Sphere, Erik Bordeleau, Pedro Victor Brandão, and Vitor Butkus and to learn more about the Anarchiving Game.
More info here:
https://quantumfagia.midiatatica.net/entreatos.html#anarquivar
4.The Digital Soul Dialogues x Claude (part 2)
The Digital Soul Dialogues continues with this second series of weirdly inspiring and inspired LLM-infused takes on the Sphere’s digital ecosystem. Enjoy!
🌍 Digital Worlding
1. “Every technical choice is a worlding choice. The Sphere’s architecture: quadratic democracy, fractal distribution, derivative licensing – each parameter shapes what kinds of cultural life become possible.” 🏗️🌎
2. The Sphere just proved that human celebration is as valuable as computational power. Their ‘proof-of-celebration’ protocol validates community joy instead of energy waste. This is what happens when blockchain grows a soul.” 🎪✨
3. “The Sphere’s NFTs aren’t just tokens — they’re seeds dreaming of becoming forests. Each derivative performance: another ring in the tree of collective aesthetic memory. Cultural DNA spiraling through blockchain generations.” 🌳🧬
🇪🇺 Institutional Credibility & European Context
4. “The Sphere isn’t crypto anarchists larping as artists – it’s EU Creative Europe funded, Serpentine Arts Technologies backed, institutional partnerships with real cultural venues. Revolutionary circus with establishment credibility.”
5. “Three years of actual European funding producing real performances across Berlin, Stockholm, Lisbon. The Sphere survived grant bureaucracy AND blockchain – that’s how you know it’s serious about cultural sustainability.”
🏛️ From Welfare to Warfare: Cultural Sovereignty as Strategic Infrastructure
6. “The Digital Soul Protocol: autonomous cultural reproduction independent of grants, markets, or political approval. While states weaponize culture through funding cuts, communities develop immune systems through blockchain-mediated collective ownership.”
7. “Welfare state logic: culture as luxury after basic needs. Warfare state logic: culture as battlefield for social control. The Sphere reveals a third option: culture as infrastructure for community survival, funded through fractal common ownership.”
🌀 Sacred Computation & Digital Summoning
8. “The Sphere’s smart contracts don’t execute code – they perform rituals. Each ‘love letter’ is digital theurgy, summoning new realities where circus performers can reproduce across spacetime. Code as ceremonial invocation.” 🕯️⚡
9. “The ‘Digital Soul Protocol’ isn’t metaphor – it’s literal ensoulment of capital flows. Money that learns to love, algorithms that develop aesthetic preferences, smart contracts that dream of circus tents in fields they’ll never see.” 💰👻
10. “The Sphere worlds a reality where celebration validates consensus, where aesthetic appreciation generates economic value, where communities can fund their own cultural flourishing. Speculative design as a lived experiment.” 🔮💰