Judy Mam talks shifting the economic paradigm and creating a community for artists and collectors with DADA.nyc
Judy Mam is the cofounder of dada.nyc, the only social network where artists from all over the world speak to each other through digital drawings, creating provably scarce collaborative art in the blockchain. Before founding DADA, Judy was a creative director in advertising. She writes about film and other topics. She lives in New York.
What is DADA.nyc? Tell us the story of how it was conceived.
DADA is a social network where people talk to each other through drawings. With other social networks you upload pictures and write text, but on DADA you make drawings and then someone from anywhere in the world can reply to you with another drawing. This creates spontaneous visual conversations between people from all around the world. The idea belongs to my co-founder and CEO, Beatriz Helena Ramos, who was a successful commercial artist in New York. She worked for some of the biggest brands in the world and at some point she realized that artists in general capture very little of the value that they produce or help produce. She decided that this needed to change and came up with DADA.
How did you get into the blockchain space? What keeps you here?
We started DADA about five years ago. We were experimenting with different ways of monetizing the beautiful drawings we have on the site. In 2017 we attended the Ethereal Summit and saw the possibilities of the blockchain in regards to making digital assets out of digital content, and having more just systems for community participation and remuneration. We felt that that was the way to go.
Why did the DADA platform decide to utilize blockchain technology?
Once you tokenize a drawing or any kind of digital content, it becomes a unique digital asset on the blockchain which means that it can be transacted– you can own it, you can sell it, and it’s verifiably yours. If we tokenize a drawing as a single non-fungible token (NFT) it is a verifiable digital object and if you buy it from DADA it belongs to you. This could create a whole new market for digital art.
Another thing we love about using blockchain technology is that when we tokenize a drawing and attach it to the blockchain there’s a verification of who created that drawing, which is always going to be there. If you buy digital art, then you can also verify ownership. This was a game changer for us because our previous options were merchandising (where piracy is a problem) or selling individual digital drawings (where people can just take a screenshot of the digital art and claim ownership). By tokenizing digital content, we don’t have to worry about screenshotting or piracy, because a screenshot doesn’t mean that you really possess the digital object. A good example is that if you make a photocopy of a dollar bill, the value is in the dollar bill and not in the photocopy. The same goes for digital assets in the blockchain.
The last thing that excites us is that when you tokenize a drawing and create a smart contract, you can choose to distribute a percentage of the profit to the artist. Say that an artist sells a piece and the owner of the piece then sells it in the secondary market. The artist can always get a percentage of every secondary sale through the smart contract. In the real world this rarely happens, once an artist sells any work that may go up in price, the artist doesn’t get a share of that. This changes the way artists can make money.
What advantages does decentralization offer DADA?
The blockchain really allows us to create a participatory economy for our collaborative platform. This means that we are able to fairly remunerate each of the members of our community. We have also put all of our drawings in the distributed server IPFS, so even if DADA ceases to exist, the drawings will still exist and can continue to be bought and sold.
How many artists are on DADA? Where are they located?
We have over 160,000 users out of which 1–2% of them are actively engaged and making drawings. A lot of users browse DADA simply to enjoy the art that is created. The wonderful thing is that we are a truly global social network. We have artists from every continent and over 60 countries.
The visual conversations on DADA are beautiful. How do you maintain the quality of the content on the platform?
When a user signs up on DADA, they can’t just start contributing to visual conversation. Users must accrue 200 points (which is not that difficult) by completing drawings and following people. We have a gamified platform, so the more people draw the more points they get. This also helps us weed out people who come in with the intention of defacing a conversation instead of participating. The minute that we ask people to do more than one drawing, those with bad intentions don’t stick around. Because of this, visual conversations are consistent. Oftentimes, there’s so much continuity between the drawings that you can’t tell a conversation was created by more than one person.
DADA is a new type of social media. How do you moderate content?
We have policies for content moderation, but we haven’t had to ban anyone in four years. DADA really inspires people to put their best foot forward instead of creating negative content. Viewing artwork on DADA is like going into a beautiful garden. People just don’t try to destroy or deface it.
Tell us about your collaboration with Kitty Hats.
KittyHats sells apparel for your CryptoKitty such as hats and tattoos, and they came to us and said that if the cats can have hats, they should also have art. So we issued one of our collections, which is an interpretation of famous masterpieces by our artists. You could actually buy your kitty a famous work of art made by an artist on DADA. I bought my Kitty Vélasquez’s Las Meninas made by Cromomaniaco, a Chilean artist.
Who determines which pieces make it into collections? How are collections assembled? How does DADA determine which pieces are tokenized?
We’ve launched two collections so far. We launched the first in October of 2017, which was a few weeks before Cryptokitties launched! Because it was the first collection we curated it ourselves. We took a hundred different drawings that were creepy or kind of weird, since we were launching on Halloween. Our second collection launched recently is from a conversation called Descontrol. For this collection, our community voted on what their favorite visual conversations were. And we are launching a third collection soon, also voted by the community. As we progress with this, we will probably find a way to involve the community more efficiently.
In the future will individual artists be able to choose whether their pieces get tokenized?
Probably not. We are a collaborative platform and because of that we have decided to launch artwork as collections. Right now we have over 110,00 drawings in our collection, which means we are the largest collection of provably rare digital art. Our visual conversations make us unique. We are the only platform where people create art together, and that is reflected in how we decide to tokenize the art in collections as well.
We also feel that what is special about DADA is that when people draw on our platform, they don’t draw with the expectation of producing or selling, they come with the expectation to play, express themselves, and create art freely. This is not art that has to be vetted by curators, it’s art that you make spontaneously because you want to communicate with other people. If we turn it into a marketplace it will destroy the spirit of the platform. The lovely thing about DADA is that artists don’t have to worry about selling because we take care of that. We issue the collections based on input from the community. Artists profit just from participating.
How does DADA change the economic paradigm for artists if not all artists can tokenize their art?
It has to do with how we distribute earnings for artists who sell pieces on DADA. The artist gets 60% of the earnings, 30% goes to a community fund (distributed to all artists on DADA), and 10% goes to everyone who participated in that particular conversation. Although the community fund may seem like a small amount, it eventually adds up.
Why is it important that the process of creating art is made collaborative by DADA? What kinds of opportunities does this afford to artists?
Creating art is primarily a solitary activity. Art is also something that is not remunerated fairly in this world. So not only do artists need economic validation, but they also need the validation of feeling like they are in a community of their peers. The art world now is predicated on an individual race to the top. Very, very few artists are at the top of the pyramid. DADA is creating an alternate system where artists know each other and can benefit from collaboration. We are creating a network where people who could have never met in real life because of geographic limitations can converse together. Technology allows for this immediacy between artists and collectors and we’re just taking advantage of that. There is power in artists not feeling so alone in their fight to survive. But we are also experimenting with creating collaborative pieces that benefit everyone who participates in them. For the upcoming Ethereal Summit we are creating a multimedia piece called Soul in The Machine, that includes digital collaborative drawing plus handmade mementos sent from artists worldwide: a bridge between technology and humanity.
Tell us about the name DADA and the logo.
When we were trying to come up with a name for the platform, I came up with a list of about 250 names. One day Beatriz (my co-founder) just turned to me and said, “How about DADA?” Dadaism was an art movement at the beginning of the 20th century for artists who decided to go against the grain of the establishment. At that point everything was very academic, and Dadaists said art could be anything, from a performance to a photograph, to a found object. Dadaism disrupted the art world, and we are continuing in that tradition. With the logo, we were really trying to infuse some human feeling into the platform that we’re creating.
You’re an avid blogger. Could you tell us a little bit about the origin of your blog?
When blogging was all the rage in the 90s, I started The Grande Enchilada, which was basically my opinions about food, travel, film, politics, culture. But I realized I wrote a lot about films so I spun out I’ve Had It With Hollywood, which, as its name implies, is a very opinionated blog about film. I happen to think the majority of Hollywood movies are dreck and it is a pity that people don’t get to see stories with different cultural points of view. Not everything is always about a male hero who insists on saving the world. I wrote film reviews for a newspaper in Mexico before I moved to NY years ago, so I had experience.
What are some of the coolest opportunities that have come your way, or relationships that you’ve formed through blogging?
To be honest, blogging takes time and consistency. For the longest time I could see that someone in Finland was reading me religiously. I was so grateful to that person. A couple of times I got hired for freelance advertising gigs more on the strength of my writing on the blog than on my portfolio (good call!). My rants against Trump in The Grande Enchilada got me a gig as a regular guest of a news show on NY 1 News in Spanish. Got my 15 minutes of fame. My friends all wanted to know my opinion of Roma. I really liked it.
How did you and Beatriz meet?
I used to be her client! I was a creative director in an advertising agency and her studio, Dancing Diablo, did amazing animation and illustration. She is an amazing artist. Years later, when I was already consulting, she came to me with an idea for DADA and I jumped on board.
Connect with Judy on her Twitter and her blog The Grande Enchilada. Keep updated with news from DADA by subscribing to the DADA Digest.
Write to Roshni Rawal at roshnirawal@berkeley.edu. The she256: Fireside Chats are sponsored by Upscribe.
