Headless DAO

An Experimental Art DeFi Engine

Introducing HeadlessDAO, Accursed Share’s decentralized autonomous organization.

General Structure

For the time being, HeadlessDAO will adopt a simple, stable grant DAO structure (references include Moloch DAO and Gitcoin).

Members will submit proposals, which must be ready on a two month cycle to begin. Our target is for a grant to be given every month, and that project will be auctioned in two months or less. The revenue will be split between the grant fund, controlled by DAO, and the artist team.

The DAO’s purpose will be to provide funds and other forms of support for projects that explore the NFT as a new art medium. This might mean using live data to explore visual, aural, or financial processes, as well as integrating communities with art through sensors, purpose, and utility.

Members will connect and discuss ideas, and teams assemble around their ability to contribute, manage, or procure services needed for the project. Cost estimates, which Accursed Share could help with, would be included in proposals.

The grant could cover 100% of the costs, over specific periods of time, all of which would also be included in proposals.

Voting Rights

NFTs minted through Accursed Share’s projects will enable voting rights. First, on the art production grants, and later on more robust governance proposals. Every subsequent project’s NFTs will carry a decreasing voting weights, meaning that the Curse Ticket NFT will carry the most weight, with the Auerbach Process Series NFTs coming next. This helps ensure a reward for our early adopters, who are making this project possible.

Dividends

DAO membership entitles active members to a redistribution of DAO proceeds from the sale of art projects produced by the DAO. The artist will be able to determine what percentage of NFT sales will be distributed to the DAO token holders.

Cadence

We could set a cadence for grant releases, say, every quarter on a specific date in order to help ensure voter turnout.

Roles

The “Whip”: a Whip would ping the Proposal Discussion chats when activity is low, or when loose ends appear. We could also potentially provide additional structure through “breakout rooms” for accepted proposals that the Whip would ping to help projects from disintegrating.

General Features

Regular Cadences

DAO activities (proposal voting, calls) occur on a regular cadence to produce predictability in terms of process, in order to increase participation.

Round-ups

Hosting regular calls with the DAO members to get the most engaged members to actively discuss ideas and needs with one another.

Community Calls

A part of the Discord should be open to the public. In this case, a particular room that allows non-members to express interest in participating in a community call. This generally makes more sense for Grant DAOs, where individuals join community calls in order to pitch ideas and get feedback to improve their chances for winning a grant.

Conceivably, goals could include

Working with art organizations or collectives in big cities we would like to establish “bases” in
Working with collectives in small cities where finances could make a bigger impact
Open letter to work with collectives - selection based on opportunity and ideas
DAO created NFTs to highlight and explore new technology created by the company, potentially in conjunction with the studio.
Using NFT art as a channel for producing novel financial products that can be used to help individuals and businesses OUTSIDE of the crypto, NFT, or art spaces.

Why Headless

HeadlessDAO takes its name from Acéphale, Bataille’s infamous secret society—and equally infamous public review.

Despite being Headless, our DAO is two-faced, like Janus. One face keeps an eye on our private affairs, the other one faces the world. In the same way, this two-facedness reconciles all manner of binaries and contradictions: past and future; sacred and profane; civilization and culture.

Janus was a god of beginnings and endings; transitions and doorways; motion and change; trade and exchange. He was claimed to have minted the first coin, and to mark the onset of historic ages.

He was invoked and propitiated at the start of any ceremony, before any other deity. He had no specialized priests, but the King of Sacred Rites himself would celebrate him. The doors to his temple were open during war and closed during peacetime.

As are we.

We thus place Headless under the protective and strategic aegis of a great archaic decentralized power. In addition to providing Headless with the leeway to develop its own customs, mores and ritual practices, its formation will underpin Accursed Share’s own meta-narrative as a work of conceptual art composed of other works of conceptual art.

To be in this together means to become This together.