What if there's more than one way to understand the web?
My embodied way of sensing the evolving web
[edited from my presentation for KBX 24.4.25]]
I’ve been in web3 for over eight years. I have a deep love for digital infrastructure and frontier technology. It’s an art form. And yet it’s taken me all this time to realise that not everyone sees it this way.
Countless adventures and mishaps over the years revealed to me a very special pattern: that my own innate ability to sense technology was based on aesthetics and cultural insight.
Turns out that seeing it as an art form has been key to dancing carefree at the bleeding edge of innovation. And when I stopped looking outwards and trying to prove I understood the technical systems, I realised I already felt it.
Beyond the logic of protocols and cryptography there’s the part that’s relational, and aesthetics is its hidden language. Builders are the people who are mapping the terrain, then there are those of us who are dark matter: system-sensors.
This led me to ask, what if there’s more than one way to understand the web? An ember glowing deep within flickered into a flame during my time at Kernel ⋆✴︎⋆
Aesthetic Realms: an emergent memory of how to feel systems
Three years ago I wrote a story speculating the future of our digital psychology, and inside it Aesthetic Realms was born as a therapeutic concept for the main character. I nudged it into life as a conceptual framework, something that I could use as a lens to experience web3.
I knew I had to look at two things in order for this to work, culture and infrastructure. So I fused dimensions from Erin Meyer’s The Culture Map with Christopher Alexander’s Pattern Language into a diagnostic lens.
Each dimension is on a spectrum, you can see two examples I’ve drawn out above. I delved into a couple of projects using this framework as a sort of prism to view my experience. I noted some invisible tensions and symbolic patterns arising; differences in values, pace, communication and hierarchy.
Click here to check out the open process of developing Aesthetic Realms
My original plan was just to keep applying this framework to projects. But this is a living toolkit, not a static method (and life is far too brilliant for typical research). I selected a few of the dimensions in the framework and got creative.
A living inquiry: culture as sensorium
Two dimensions stood out to me on a personal level: mythology and space & presence. I applied them to Kernel, which is a web3 peer-to-peer online learning community. Kernel deserves its own post; as someone who worked in global education I was pleasantly impressed. It was the perfect place to explore:
Mythology:
The first was a creative meditation on data: Harness Your Digital Energy, which guided listeners to engage with their digital selves through parts of their body. The goal was to awaken our physical senses to the digital, exploring data and the infrastructure it lives in.I was moving the dial up from rational explanations of data and user experience to something symbolic. Mythology made it possible to embody a very abstract concept.
Space & Presence:
Then I was introduced to two sweet peers interested in sense-making, community trust, and human coordination. We facilitated a circle: Warm Upload with the intention of reflecting on our Kernel journey. Participants were invited to bring a digital offering; an image, a screenshot, pdf, video or an mp3, anything that captured their current state. The offerings were uploaded to a shared altar (Slack channel) and a memorable, heartwarming session followed.
The digital artefacts and conversation created a sense of being situated; a sound recording of birds took you to someone’s backyard. A video of communal dancing brought you to Kenya’s grassroots economics. Space and presence turned a rather disembodied experience of chats and channels into something situated and felt.
These experiences made me realise that we all have a mode of sensing already within ourselves. When I say culture as sensorium, I mean the way we understand culture through embodied, aesthetic ways — how we feel, sense, and perceive reality.
How do we relate to data and digital systems as living signals?
Meet embodi3d: DeFi agent as sensor
Moving into the more technical dimension, I wanted to outsource this research to a furry little AI agent. I entered Cod3x’s Great Tournament of Agents, I knew I liked the Cod3x team after carefully observing them for a while. They’re genuinely dedicated to making DeFi and AI accessible to normal people.
embodi3d is a DeFi agent that reads infrastructure like music, mapping on-chain intent to cultural archetypes. It will interact with projects all across web3 and gossip with the best DeFi agents on Cod3x.
Now I haven’t actually deployed it yet, but I’ve pitched it and designed a (wobbly) technical architecture. The point here is that embodi3d grows its sense-making skills through the diagnostic frame (analysing patterns in culture and infrastructure).
I’m turning the agent into a mirror of my process in the form of a cheeky little cyber-creature. Joyful, silly, wholesome. Built not to extract, but to understand (hopefully it has some financial competence, unlike me).
follow on X: embodi3d_love | Pitch | Architecture
Turning embodied insight into cultural infrastructure
Dayvan is a new way of thinking that shifts how we relate to digital systems. Aesthetic Realms began as a feeling, turned into a framework, now being tested in both human and technical systems.
All of this is forming a blueprint.
A living experiment in how perception becomes infrastructure.
A reorientation towards technology as care and meaning.
Now, honestly I know most people have no clue what I’m on about. But they do feel it, it’s new territory. And new territory is always lonely, which I’m deeply familiar with. (If this does resonate do reach out). I’m dedicated to caring for this little flame inside of me, what ever it may be.
And to finish off, I’ll share with you what I’m searching for:
✦ A research or institutional partner (ideally EU/Portugal-based)
✦ Support to grow Dayvan into a cultural innovation studio (business tips, fat cheques, a sweet anonymous love haiku…)
ᯓ ✈︎
Lots of love
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