Enter Cellarius, a Transmedia Universe 100 Years in the Future
Join the Cellarius Alpha and help build a collaborative science fiction universe.
The year is 2110. The sentient Artificial Superintelligence named Cellarius controls the majority of Earth’s resources after a period of upheaval known as the Reformation. Its aims are unknown: perhaps self-preservation, galactic expansion, or something that humans can’t even comprehend. In glistening megalopoli, elite transhumans live in harmony with the AI, their minds “coupled” directly to Cellarius. Outside the cities, tech-averse factions and roaming rebels battle with the elements for survival. Between them all are the sentient machines of our own creation.
What happens next is up to you. This is the world of Cellarius, a collaborative transmedia universe integrated with blockchain technology that hopes to span every conceivable artistic medium — film, fiction, animation, music, games — with user-generated content that collectively tells the story of humanity’s ceaseless quest to push the limits of technology. Drawing from elements ranging from cyberpunk to popular sci-fi works, fan fiction to MMORPGs, Cellarius provides creators around the world a canvas to express themselves within a vibrant community and work together to build a new sci-fi mythos.
Applications for the groundbreaking Cellarius Private Alpha are now open for creators who want to join the universe and contribute their works. Check out the Cellarius White Paper and Style Guide, but for the fastest voyage into the future, the Cellarius Universe Guide is detailed and imaginative enough to get anyone’s creative juices flowing.
We caught up with Igor Lilic, Mally Anderson, and Sean O’Connor from the Cellarius team, to get some more insight into the project and how it works…
What kind of world are we living in at the genesis of Cellarius?
We’re already living in it! Our first story block begins in 2009, with the mining of the genesis block of Bitcoin. The catalytic event happens in the year 2084, when an artificial intelligence called Cellarius takes control of the world, from nuclear weapons to power grids, for reasons that aren’t yet clear to humanity. In exploring that universe, we take a hard science approach. We want to explore themes like artificial intelligence, cryptocurrency, global warming, and what happens as the lines between humankind and machine begin to blur. That said, a guiding principle of the Cellarius project is that our view on the future is a little more optimistic than most science fiction tends to be.
What are the media through which you foresee people telling the Cellarius story?
We see the Cellarius Universe taking form — in the short term — through short stories, illustration, and other user-generated content. We’ve been producing a series of short animated clips. We’re really interested in the idea of transmedia, and how we can use principles of decentralization to create an emergent, collaborative media franchise. That’s one of the big technological challenges we want to take on: how can we track the provenance of the works that get contributed to the universe and ensure that creators are properly attributed as the platform continues to grow?
There are a lot of multimedia projects that are similar to Cellarius in some aspects of the project, but have there been any open, collaborative transmedia project like this before?
We haven’t seen the idea of transmedia truly come to life outside of a core franchise that takes its own storyline and creates derivative works around it. It’s a new and unexplored medium. The other thing we’re really excited about is the potential to create global storylines. We’re already working with artists creating renditions of how they believe their cities would look in this version of the future. For example, we’re working with the non-profit Code to Inspire, based in Afghanistan, to source sketches from the young women in the program — sketches of what they think their hometown of Herat might look like in the future. We’re trying to make this a global and inclusive platform that enables people to tell the stories of their individual cities and cultures and weave them into the fabric of the Cellarius Universe.
Where has the team drawn their influence from in terms of world building?
A lot of the universe started with the classics of cyberpunk as the inspiration: Blade Runner, William Gibson, the Deus Ex series, etc. But Cellarius differs in a number of ways. We’re trying to push new boundaries and be more optimistic about the potential for technology to improve many aspects of human life, and we have a more global focus. We are taking a step beyond the cyberpunk tropes, and have created a genre and aesthetic we call Blockpunk.
Personally, I’m a huge written science fiction fan — Asimov, Vonnegut. As a team, we cover a wide range of interests and are thankfully open to learning more. A sample of our interests are Afrofuturism, World of Warcraft, tabletop gaming, economic simulations, storytelling that challenges current tropes (Ursula Le Guin comes to mind), and David Bowie. We really try to draw from our diverse backgrounds and trends we see in the real world.
With so many creators and voices, surely there will be disputes about content and subject matter. How do you plan to tackle this issue?
Our approach right now is to seed the universe. We are commissioning professional writers and storytellers from around the world, inviting them to tell stories they’re interested in. We’ve been very hands-off with the direction and really want to give our artistic community complete creative control, within the story frame of the Universe Guide. These initial stories are meant to propose ideas and allow the community to create the narrative themselves. It’s a little bit of “choose your own adventure” in this way.
In our White Paper we’ve introduced a concept that we call “Cellarius Core Canon” — we want to build tools to allow the community to explicitly vote on and canonize particular works. These canonized works will be “the” story of Cellarius. To do this, we use the blockchain to record and incentivize story curation with the added benefits of everything being transparent and immutable. During the Alpha and Beta, we plan to test the assumptions of the platform as they evolve. Our hypothesis is that over time the community will become capable of taking over the reins because it’s something they care about deeply.
How is blockchain tech incorporated into Cellarius?
Blockchain is involved in a few different ways. Cellarius is a ConsenSys spoke project and so we’re using Ethereum to try to create new experiences. For example, creating bounties for content commissions is something we’re excited to try. The idea that fans could pay professionals to extend particular parts of the universe is also exciting to think about. We’ve written a Medium post that details our immediate technical roadmap more thoroughly, but the TL;DR is that the platform is fundamentally blockchain-supported and the technology also plays a key role in the story universe. We hope that engaging a broader user base than some other Ethereum projects will bring more people on board to the possibilities of blockchain and decentralization.
Disclaimer: The views expressed by the author above do not necessarily represent the views of Consensys AG. ConsenSys is a decentralized community with ConsenSys Media being a platform for members to freely express their diverse ideas and perspectives. To learn more about ConsenSys and Ethereum, please visit our website.
