Richelle Steyn

Richelle Steyn

Founder of Art Stoke Commons — where resistance art meets systems change. Blending creativity with code, I explore how decentralised frameworks and cultural production can shape new economies rooted in meaning, dignity, and social impact. Art is my activism, Web3 is my toolkit, and disruption is part of the design.
  • Joined: August 4, 2023
  • Articles: 45

Dream Technologies and Ancestral Images: Reimagining Digital Art as Cultural Repair

Dream Technologies and Ancestral Images: Reimagining Digital Art as Cultural Repair

"Nice Aunties’ work hints at a future for digital art that is more human, more ritualised, and more ancestrally grounded. Cobb and Slattery provide the philosophical scaffolding; Khoi and San traditions offer the ethical and imaginal inheritance; dream technologies, fictional or real, show how images are medicine. What emerges is a powerful proposition: digital art can become a contemporary dream cave—an imaginal commons for healing, memory, and cultural repair."

Timekeepers of the Anthropocene: Digital Art in the Grammar of Ancestral Time

Timekeepers of the Anthropocene: Digital Art in the Grammar of Ancestral Time

Tewame Tiyolicha Kawitl: Timekeepers of the Anthropocene (invites us) to rethink how we hold time, and how digital art might become a vessel for repairing its ruptures. The colonial and industrial eras (of the Anthropocene) imposed a linear, extractive temporality—one that measures productivity rather than reciprocity, acceleration rather than attunement. It is this regime of time .. that has destabilised the planet’s climate and our collective nervous system.

The Quiet Extractive Machine: How Soft-Power Art Non-Profits are Rewriting Africa’s Future in VR

The Quiet Extractive Machine: How Soft-Power Art Non-Profits are Rewriting Africa’s Future in VR

There is a new kind of extractive industry rising quietly across the African cultural landscape—nothing as obvious as mining, nothing as brutal as the colonial museum raid. Instead, it arrives with friendly logos, “innovation labs,” creative grants, workshops for emerging storytellers, and the promise of global visibility.

Designing a Regenerative Cultural Economy

Designing a Regenerative Cultural Economy

"When values-aligned actors begin to acquire digital works from the Art Stoke Commons ecosystem, they don’t just support individual artists - they validate a new logic of cultural production. Each successful Hive becomes a proof-of-concept. Each replication, a new node in a growing network of islands of coherence. If it works in South Africa where the wounds of inequality and the hunger for cultural healing are deep, it can serve as a blueprint for global cultural resurgence in the digital age."