Why We're Building ROOT: A New Creative Infrastructure for a New Creative Era
ROOT is open source infrastructure that lets artists scale their work through their core communities without giving up control or ownership. It supports the full lifecycle of a project: fundraising, collaboration, distribution, and long-term value-sharing. It grew out of our own practice and is now moving into active development as a solution for the broader field.
ROOT in Practice
You're leaving a show. Something moved you. You're still inside it. Maybe you want to support the cause. Maybe you want a remembrance. Maybe you want to gift the experience to someone who wasn't there. For $30 — the cost of merch you'd have bought without thinking — you can do all three. A scratch card with two codes: one that unlocks the work on your phone, and one to give to anyone you choose. You get to bring the work home. Whether it's a film, a performance, a show, it travels through you, to someone who needs to experience it.
And when you buy it, something else happens too. The money flows directly into the ecosystem of the project: to the artists and collaborators, to the communities and causes at the heart of the work, and to the early believers who put in $50 or $500 when it was just an idea.
No platform deciding who sees it. No algorithm choosing what spreads.
This is what it means to ROOT a project from the ground up.
What We're Building
ROOT combines a peer-to-peer publishing application with an independent smart-contract governance layer. Value moves transparently between artists, micro-funders, collaborators, and audiences. When an artist ROOTs a project, the community and infrastructure they've built don't disappear. They carry forward to projects that follow.
ROOT's first release is video-based, and we are designing it from the start for use across performance, music, and media practices, including how artists capture, distribute, and build revenue around recordings of live work.
