Earth
Working in partnership with OMA, the architecture firm helmed by Rem Koolhaas, and also backed by crypto founders such as Vitalik Buterin, Earth is a collective with members in multiple locations including New York, Los Angeles, London, and Berlin. “We’re working across architecture, technology, design, and art,” explains Christopher Kulendran Thomas, a founding member and artist, who is currently presenting the project alongside exhibitions at London’s Institute of Contemporary Art and Berlin’s KW Institute for Contemporary Art. The artist describes these shows as “covert sci-fis about Web3” and explains how the exhibitions serve as “prompts for Earth’s community to build shared tools for cooperative economies.” Anush Sarkisian, a member of the collective, added, “Earth is convening a research and development community to experiment with various parts of the citizenship stack for a cloud city.” The collective has announced nothing publicly about what they’re working on; their website hosts only an enigmatic text about free-market communism, the return of history, and the end of the West, with an invitation not to exit, but to advance to “Level 2.” One would typically expect an orchestrated press rollout with a project such as this, but the fact that Earth’s activities are shrouded in mystery and indistinguishable from a conceptual art project speaks to the mercurial nature of the crypto city.