A radical experiment at the intersection of New Media Art and Digital Humanities – a slow-profit, culturally-rooted digital commons using blockchain infrastructure to reimagine intellectual property, art’s role in society, and post-growth economies. It functions not merely as a platform, but as an applied theoretical intervention into the politics of digital culture.
Where New Media often focuses on the aesthetic and formal shifts brought by technology, and Digital Humanities focuses on digitising and reinterpreting cultural knowledge, Art Stoke Commons does both – and goes further: it intervenes in the material systems of distribution, ownership, and meaning that underpin digital life itself.
We’re not just building a platform – we’re prototyping a new species of economic institution where art, justice, narrative, and decentralised tech can cohere.
Art Stoke Commons is not just a framework for creative practice – it is itself a generative, living artwork. Its medium is social structure, its material is participation, and its form is emergent. It is designed not to control but to cultivate – a space where the infrastructure of art becomes art itself.
Art Stoke Commons is a digital art marketplace and licensing portal – with a twist. That twist is a new economy: decentralized, artist-led, and rooted in cultural and social regeneration. Instead of replicating extractive, profit-maximizing systems, we’re building infrastructure that puts creative flourishing first – where profit follows purpose, not the other way around.
At its heart, Art Stoke Commons is a cultural commons – a container for artists, developers, ecosystem stewards, and system change agents to co-create new ways of working, valuing and exchanging. This is about experimenting with alternative economic models that better serve the full spectrum of human creativity and contribution.
We align with the principles of slow profit, social economy, and commitment pooling, drawing inspiration from projects like Grassroots Economics and the Serafu Network. This allows us to recognize and reward all forms of work – especially the kinds of cultural labour and meaning-making that our current systems overlook or undervalue.
Art Stoke Commons exists because we believe artists are not primarily motivated by money. They don’t thrive in environments built for maximum efficiency or extraction. Instead, they thrive in ecosystems of trust, experimentation, and creative freedom – where their role as cultural disruptors, healers, and visionaries is understood and supported.
Artists operate on the bleeding edge. They carry the dangerous ideas that help societies evolve – and sometimes survive. Art Stoke Commons exists to protect that edge, and to build new socio-economic ground beneath it.
This is more than a platform. It’s an invitation to co-create a future where value is redefined, ownership is shared, and creative labour is honoured as essential to our collective well-being.
Here are a number of articles about Art Stoke Commons and a presentation.