Nearly 1,000 attendees joined our event last week in Brussels at Reset. Dana Kuehr & Catalina warmed up the dance floor, setting the stage for the legendary Move D's transcendent set. Tijana T closed the night, keeping the energy high until 4:30 AM.
In late February, we hosted an event in Denver that showcased local talent and celebrated the fusion of music and digital art. DEEDZ, a rising star in the local scene, kicked off the evening with an electrifying set. Latashá then took the stage, captivating the audience and bringing the house down.
This March, together with LUKSO, we had an incredible evening at Austin’s favorite natural wine watering hole LoLo, exploring themes of identity, ownership, and the New Creative Economies through immersive art by Cibelle Cavalli Bastos and Tabitha Swanson.
Refraction and The Department of Decentralization are presenting the art programming at this year’s ETHBerlin from May 24-26. The exhibition is curated through an Open Call. Interested artists can submit their artwork from April 10th to May 10th.
We asked Brazilian-American artist Rick Silva a few questions ahead of his Refraction artwork drop—a reflection on the solar eclipse. The work is available exclusively for Refract Pass holders and exhibited for the first time at our New York event at Public Records on April 4th.
Understanding the necessity and the asymmetries of live streams is what drove our most recent research project in partnership with Livepeer - trying to think through what the future of live streams might look like and, also, crucially, how Web3 technologies might intervene.
Refraction returns to Miami on December 8th for a day-to-night session of talks, music and art. In partnership with new music streaming platform Sona, we're taking over Understory in Little River, celebrating the city's finest local and international culture.
Refraction touches down in Lisbon for the first time, bringing a handful of friends along for the ride. In collaboration with Arroz Estúdios and ArtDAO, we’ve curated 10 days of digital art with the help of Ellie Pritts, Agoria, objkt.one and Zora.
The Artists x Refraction Fellowship will be comprised of 12 artists, from both emerging and established artistic spaces. These artists will work with Refraction and Lens to create new work and learn how to best use the platform to release art on the web3 social protocol.
The Amesterdam-based Moroccan artist shares valuable advice for emerging artists, emphasizing the importance of curiosity, fearlessness, and remaining receptive to the myriad opportunities that blockchain technology presents, including community.
The Community Fund is the next iteration of Refraction’s grants programme, introducing a regenerative model for Refraction to support projects, and allowing the community to have a larger stake in decision making.
The idea behind the Internet Yami-Ichi is simple: 'what happens when we start to "browse" face-to-face?' Partnering with Miami Community Radio, Refraction launched Miami's first Internet Yami-Ichi, bringing an art auction to Miami where people could turn off and tune in.
Taking over a 9000 square meter former turbine hall, Monster Mutations provided an alternate space to explore the outer reaches of the consciousness cosmos.
Taking place over two days, with over 30 visual artists and 15 musical acts, Refraction aims to challenge the framework and systems of contemporary culture — Miami Art Week is the perfect platform from which to achieve that mission.
Behind the good vibes, internet stations are having something of a crisis. But recent Refraction grant recipient Miami Communiity Radio believe that web3's community focus holds the key to longterm sustainability.
The global reach of Refraction's Season 02/03 Creative Grants points to a potential future for web3: a diverse group of voices, existing in both real and virtual space, creating projects that transcend current conversations around creativity on the blockchain.
.png)
Joel Eel of Perpetual Care comes through with the first in our seasonal mix series. Intimate and warm, filled with moments of beauty and surprise—this is the sound of a community coming together to create, as he puts it, "our own universe of sound."
For our latest Berlin event in partnership with the Tezos Foundation and Infite Objects, Tabitha Swanson curated 16 artworks from the Refraction collection, describing the magic of memories, dreams, and experiences refracted through the digital lens.
The 24 selected proposals included a sustainable fashion label expanding into digital wearables; an in-person web3 flea market in Miami; an on-chain Romeo & Juliet-style play co-written with GPT-3; a project to bring community radio on-chain, & more.
The ocean is the site of rebirth, a place of curiosity and a home for an alternative, Afrofuturist ideology that continues to pulse through Black culture. In her mix for Refraction, Father Dukes explores the resiliency of culture, and music as a force of vitality and creation.
For over three decades, visual artist Abu Qadim Haqq has created artworks for Detroit techno and adjacent electronic music that depict entire worlds, decolonial incursions beyond human experience, fragmented within the space and format of vinyl records.
Bringing together artists that explore the natural and geological worlds, unexpected glitch and non-human intelligence. Fuelled by irreverence, playfulness and humour, ‘Surveyors of Magic’ offers a space to explore and rebuild.
For this season's theme of Minted Chaos, Refraction and Pure Rave are partnering on an audio experiment inviting the extended Refraction community to create their own Chance Dance audio piece in Pure Rave style. Selected tracks will then be published on Nina Protocol.
While Pure Rave cites experimental turntablists like Christan Marclay and Maria Chavez as influences, they also are working within the rich history of Detroit electronic music, with an origin story linked to the Motor City's robust and historic dance music scene.
Centered on the work of eight digital artists, including the decolonial textual work of RIKKA and Jean Petra's sci-fi hyperpop, and soundtracked by eight incredible DJs, Refraction worked with Brazilian collective MAGMA to create an immersive, energetic, and thoughtful night in São Paulo.
Crossing both geographies and genres, and mixing DJing, live sets, and everything in between, Refraction's two-night event at Berlin's Panke Culture was a series to remember. Listen to the recordings here.
Partnering with two of Miami's most forward-thinking party crews, Safe and Jezebel, Refraction's most raucous party to date was held in Miami on March 19 at The Boombox. Revisit the mixes from Danny Daze, Sel.6, and Amelia Holt & Yumi.
.jpg)
Working at the boundaries of hip-hop, deconstructed club, and stoner electronics from the likes of 063N13, JWords, dreamcastmoe, LATASHÁ, Prefuse 73, and Aluna, the ZeroSpace lineup complemented the visual world that reflects the diversity and vision of the Refraction community.
With crates full of the wiggly, funky house—and a Korg keyboard to jam over top—Atlanta's Byron the Aquarius took over Vancouver's Paradise for an unforgettable night of jacked up sounds. Revisit the magic with an exclusive mix he recorded for Refraction.
Internat radio stations have popped up in cities on almost every continent, dedicated to platforming a diverse array of sounds from places big and small, bringing local micro-scenes to the entire world.
FLEX AVE showcased Flex Dance Music icons Epic B, Hitmakerchinx, and Uninamise, who set the stage for the subculture's distinct contortionist choreography, tracing the kinetic connections across Black music history while building Afrofuturist worlds of sound and dance.
The advent of web3 presents an opportunity for alternatives that exist outside of this imaginary stranglehold but, in order to start thinking about music outside of our current model, we need to start thinking about the value of music differently.
.png)
.png)
.png)
.jpg)
