Arkive - The world's first decentralised museum (Jordan Topoleski, founder Arkive)

Yeah, so the idea behind Archive is trying to reverse the model of a museum. So basically, we're taking a system right now that exists and saying, instead of going into a place like a museum, public institution, where people have chosen to curate works and you're looking at them and consuming them, what if you flip that model around and you actually became the producer of it? What if you actually chose what was acquired and what was curated into the collection? And thinking about it without the constructs of the borders of walls or within a physical place, in and of itself or one location. So the idea behind Archive is it's a whole global membership that comes together to curate pieces of art into the collection and then also is displaying them globally. So you hop off a plane in London and Los Angeles and Seoul.

So good.

The idea is that when works are actually acquired into the collection, members are also participating in the process of choosing where they're stored. You know, partnerships with other museums, maybe a store lobby, a hotel lobby. You can think about all different places where these pieces could be co-located. I think when you start to think about it that way, it opens up this really interesting idea of—

Yeah.

In the past, it's like the victors write history in a way. If you look at some of the models right now, I think there's an unfortunate level of storytelling being something that's super exclusive. The reason that something is chosen to be in a museum comes through, I think, less eyes and less minds than it should right now. The whole idea of Archive is saying, is there a way for us to rethink this and include access to more people? Uh, to more thoughts, to more diversity into the question of what's worthwhile to be saved, what's culturally significant to us, uh, as a society.

That is, that you're like completely flipping the idea of, uh, of what a museum is, which is really interesting. And I'm thinking like, man, I really would like to have, uh, an archive piece in the Stride office. I'm thinking, man, it would work pretty well probably over here in the background of the, of the podcast.

As long as you're willing to open it up for everyone to see. I think a really important thing for us is— Yeah, something that's out there right now, maybe a museum acquires works, but believe it or not, for most museums, it's actually about 90% of their works that are never on display, or at least are kept in storage warehouses at a single time.

That's crazy.

So we are kind of going out with this mandate of saying, can we try and have 100% public display of works at all times? So if you're a member or you're someone that's tangential to Archive membership, is this something where you can see a work and not only see it, but can we as a membership also think about placing these works in places they're supposed to be. So I think museums traditionally have often been an expression of soft power in a lot of ways, in terms of standing as a public institution that's representing a country's interests or things like that. Also hard power. You look at museums that maybe are showing things of literal colonial rule, of imperialism across the world, and stolen artifacts that have literally shown their reign throughout the times, and we kind of say, okay, That's one model doing it right now. But what if we could also say, ah, you know, the Benin Bronzes, for example, that are on display at the British History Museum right now, those probably actually belong in Benin or belong in somewhere that they're supposed to be displayed that can probably more appropriately tell the story in a little bit less of an imperialist way. And how can we take that mindset with the entirety of our collection?

Man, that is really interesting when it comes to like the place where something is displayed all of a sudden acquires a lot of value because you don't have the choice that is like, oh, are we going to put it in that angle or that angle over there? It's like, are we going to put it in this country, this country, where within the country, who gets to sort of place it, who looks over it? And I think that, like, that can add really interesting context.

Yeah.

Because when you go to a museum, it's like, you know, you enter and you go into an experience. So this places the piece of art a bit outside from what I refer to as nature, but should I?

Am I just being— Yeah. Context is so important. You can think about an item being placed in a different location. For example, you just mentioned if it was here in the office versus it was somewhere like a cultural heritage museum that was particularly focused on a very specific genre, you'd probably have very different interpretations. Even categorizing something, you can think of things like boxes and labels, even calling something contemporary art. Maybe has some loaded context behind it, or putting it in a different category. And the great piece of what we're super focused on at Archive is saying, you know, in the past, that may have been a decision that's made by a select group of people. What if we actually thought about broadening that and said our community of thousands of people were actually all contributing thoughts on where it should be and coming to group consensus on what the exact best selection of works are, but also storage opportunities for putting it on display?

I like that. So I like also what you said earlier, where it's like, you know, often a museum is a sort of way to showcase soft power. It's like, it's a showcase of power for some countries, institutions, etc. And so I'm like, for them to portray some specific narratives, and I'm like, what narrative are you trying to portray? What have you chosen to portray at Archive? And how did you choose that?

Yeah, so what we kind of did at the beginning is come together as a community and say, For this first season of curation, we want to be focused on a topic. And we said to the membership, let's all come together and think about what we want our first statement to be. We came together and we chose this theme, When Technology Was a Game Changer. The idea of that is really thinking of the primitives of technology, thinking about the influences it made from the earliest days to now, thinking about Archive, which undoubtedly is a Web3-powered organization, and thinking about this next chapter of technology. how can we pay homage with these themes of retrofuturism and thinking about the past? One thing we say at Archive is, can we shape the future by saving the past? And the first season, so the first 8 works that we're acquiring between basically when we kicked things off back in May to the end of the year, is works that fall under this theme. So it started with the Super Genesis work where we actually acquired the ENIAC patent, the patent to the first ever electronic computer. I think this was this really—

ENIAC?

Statement piece in saying, Wow, this was the first high-powered electronic numerical computer that really started off this whole movement from back in the 1950s. Also a work that was super interesting because it had an untold story to it.

What's the untold story?

We focused on a lot of archives. So there are 2 gentlemen that were actually named on the patent, but believe it or not, there are 3 women behind the scenes coming out of the University of Pennsylvania that did most of the programming of it.

No!

Super involved throughout the whole process of creation. creation and even displaying it on their demo day that they had, but no mention of them in a lot of the history books. So what we were able to do at Archive is highlight this as a super interesting, historically significant work that's, I think, a statement piece for the beginning of the collection, but also for what we're setting out to do at Archive, but also shed some light in saying, hey, we want to think about telling the story in an interesting way that might sometimes have been forgotten in the past.

I think just before I said wherever you place the piece of art, it acquires some sort of context. Being part of Archive itself becomes— almost adds to the art piece itself. And it's like, I know you're probably feeling a bit like, you know, those are art pieces standalone, but it's like if— and I really hope so— Archive becomes this fantastic, long-lasting, long-lasting community of people, it could really take another turn for a lot of art pieces that maybe didn't find the attention they deserved, didn't find the narratives they deserved, as you mentioned. And it's like it's a newfound life for these pieces.

And I honestly think— I mean, I don't think we're building a company. I think we're building an institution. And the institution has a little bit different of a mandate behind what it has. I think it's this underlying sense of longevity and thinking about, you know, if this was the last project I was working on, I'd be really excited about that. And there's something that's deeper. I think a lot of projects I've worked on in the past, you know, I've had a startup journey kind of passing through other endeavors in the fintech space and the gaming space and a consulting and developing company in the past. taking me to this point and saying, wow, this is something that's really special because it's trying to build something just like a museum that lasts for decades, that lasts for centuries, as a statement that's bigger than itself as a company, but it does something that can speak on behalf of society. That same soft power I was talking about before, it's really interesting to think how the narrative shifts that goes from being something that's maybe primarily government-sponsored or something that's speaking to a few select few that are kind of making these decisions to something that's representative of a population or thousands, tens of thousands of people that are actually contributing at the end of the day.