teia.cafe - List of Features
written by ryangtanaka
To start things off, a reminder that:
- You do not need to be an artist or art collector to use teia.cafe .
- It is not necessary to buy or own any NFTs to create/mint playlists on teia.cafe .
- While getting a crypto wallet is encouraged, it is not required to use teia.cafe .
In this article we'll take a quick look at some of the more unique features that teia.cafe has to offer - it's a site built by artists for artists - and we'd like to think that it has a different take than your usual "Web3" app out there. In no particular order:
Wallet-Based Recommendation Engines
teia.cafe does not track your data. (In fact, we don't even want it - it just clogs up our servers. 🤣) But we are now experimenting with recommendation engines built purely off of (public) on-chain data. You and that other person both have professed a deep love for portraits of women sleeping next to snakes? Surely you must have something in common with them, right?
Some people identify as artists - some as collectors - in the future, there will likely be other "roles" in the Web3 space that can be explored for further refinement. For now, the main focus is to connect the people within the space who already have layers of activities they have in common.
Status: Deployed
Future Plans: "Web3 Socials" is a very new field in the industry and has yet to find its ground, so this feature will remain experimental for a while. But once the connections are made, it opens up endless possibilities of how we might be able to find the value in these connections themselves. Wallet-based connections are inherently higher quality than Web2 data, since it contains stronger signals such as financial transactions, asset ownership, and immutable documents of actions that get recorded on chain. Though just a start, we believe this to be a fruitful endeavor for exploration for years to come.
Temporal-Based Recommendation Engines
This slider will affect the type of results the engine makes for every recommendation that you ask for. It takes into account of the fact that space and time are intrinsically related through the laws of physics - and since time data is the only "objective" data that can be found on blockchains right now, it seems to make sense to use that layer as a foundation for building connections on top of.
- ⌛ (History) will give you results in chronological order, from the very beginning of the first mint date.
- ⌚ (Here and Now) will generate more recent and "close" results. This methodology is something most people are familiar with already.
- 🌌 (Exploratory) is designed to suggest results that are more "further" away. Since time isn't something that actually exists anywhere (or any time), it does this by simulating network effects through time and "distance" values.
Yes, I'm aware that this probably sounds a bit "out there" but the exploration of how our concepts of time intermingles with our sense of "distance" - especially social ones - is likely to prove fruitful, if not interesting at the very least.
If that's not experimental enough for you, you could also check out the 🔀 True Random algorithm or the 🔥 Burn Pile "galleries" for novel works you probably won't get anywhere else.
It's also worth noting that Hic et Nunc and Teia's "objkt" listings - a series of simple numbers counting upwards, allows for essentially the same "True Random" effect from above - minus all of the processing power needed to generate objective results. Amidst all of the NFTs categorized with hash IDs, this community's way of organizing their work stands out as unique and unusual.
Status: Deployed
Future Plans: More search models, include geo-location data to refine the process further. Time and space are the only truly objective data points online!
True Multi-Media Player
This is probably the most exciting part of the dApp - it's where we can celebrate and enjoy the diverse styles and ideas of the art communities themselves. There is the usual images and video too of course, but often overlooked are the talents working within music/audio, 3d models, PDFs, and even code itself.
A few examples below:
The site itself was originally designed to be an audio-playlist style delivery and showcasing system, but applied universally to all file formats out there. The more the better, right?
Status: Deployed
Future Plans: Add support for MIDI. (My personal obsession, I'll admit. 😂) Add support for as many formats as possible. The folks at TEIA tend to consider all things art and are very open to adding new formats if the support for it is there. Inquire at their discord if that might be of interest. (Musicians - I need help with the MIDI thing. No, really.)
Mintable Playlists
The mintable playlist is the core idea behind teia.cafe, which assumes that people like to collect lists of things they like and show it around. (We're all human, after all.) If you happen to run into works that you enjoy, you can hit the favorites button and save it for later enjoyment/use in a format that already exists - the "playlist".
Why make playlists mintable on-chain? Why not just save it on some server somewhere like everywhere else? Two reasons - for its social value (spending some money to mint something online is a stronger signal than free), but also because the playlist will serve as the foundation for building more complex infrastructure on top of - especially for professional use.
A blockchain-based playlist has all the records needed for tracking all of the information needed in, say, a gallery showcase, for example - it keeps track of the artists, the status of the works, the deal-flows inside of each work, the owner(s) of each work (which there are often multiple) all in one place, where everyone can see it, all at once. This will be the focus of Phase 2 (more partnership focused), after a few months of testing on Phase 1, which gives people the ability to mint the playlist itself.
In the bigger picture, playlists are an absolutely necessary data layer for Web3 projects in the future, given that it cannot rely on engagement numbers (likes, views, shares) that traditional tech platforms typically rely on. Asking people to spend tons of money on overpriced NFTs was always a bad idea - not only is it expensive, but it is also a lossy data point that doesn't tell us much about the world as a whole. To put another way: low-cost playlist minting gives us very useful data about people's tastes and interests in a way that's objective, reliable, and clear, and is the ideal way to build the data layers of tomorrow and build our understanding of how digital economics works as a whole.
Status: Deployed, currently in testing phase.
Future Plans: "Phase 2" - commissions contracts (i.e. get paid to curate your playlists - for both professionals and hobbyists). Make sure to keep those playlists at hand because after Phase 2, you may be able to earn commissions from them as well as use them for personal use.
Social Playlists
As joked about above - if you and someone else likes the same artwork, it probably means that you have at least a few things in common with them. Taking that to the next level - we want people to use their playlists to find and discover other people they might have something in common with.
Right now crypto wallets only really serve one purpose - a storage of "money" - mostly treated as if they were interchangeable and disposable. NFTs planted the idea that maybe the wallets themselves could be deemed "valuable" if enough things were connected to it - which teia.cafe doubles-down on as a concept. And most of it starts with just making it easier for people to share what they like.
Status: Sharable links are done. A common area for people to see what others are collecting is in beta, as seen in the screenshot above.
Future Plans: The leaderboard-style "most recent" playlists has its uses but is very limiting as far as a "common area" goes. More sophisticated forms of community building and engagement is on the table for future iterations of this idea. (Which includes chats, messaging, sharable connections, etc.)
Auto-Generated Screenshot Tool
You may have noticed the QR codes in the screenshots above - currently they're pointing to our site (which will later get replaced by something more transaction-based) but the design of the individual works page was done with the idea of making it easier for artists and curators to get out screenshots and printables on-the-go.
I've been to a few NFT events (including NFTNYC 2021) but at most of these events I actually saw a lot of artists using pen and paper to compensate for basically what the dApp wasn't doing for them - including at one event where the artist literally printed out a QR code of their work on a piece of paper and taped it next to the monitor 😅 - it was kind of a sorry sight to see, honestly.
Online, I see a lot of curators posting fragments of copy-pasted information from various places in awkwardly structured threads or posts - which gets lost in the tangle of Web2 databases over time. This happens mostly because a lot of the Web3 projects out there don't actually talk to the people doing the work - the artists themselves.
Course, nothing can beat the effort and care someone puts into a custom-made, individually tailored poster or flyer - but this feature was added in just to make the process a little easier to do. I do think that if an artist puts in the time and effort to create something they think is interesting, the presentation and showcasing of it needs to reflect some of that, too.
Status: Deployed
Future Plans: Further customizability depending on industry needs and artist feedback.
Adaptive Designs/Interfaces
When it comes to user interfaces and color schemes, some people like "dark mode" - others like plain old black-text-on-white-backgrounds. Some people like red colors, others like blue. Which is the "best"? There is never a single answer. Running with the theme of letting the artworks speak for themselves, however, the idea of allowing the content of the work influence the design of the website itself came up several times. This is what we came up with:
In a nutshell, the app will attempt to enhance the expression and intentionality of each work by taking the information already embedded within.
Status: Deployed
Future Plans: The idea of using existing content to facilitate design decisions and procedures has been around for a long time but is rarely done in practice. This will be an ongoing experiment to see how far it can be taken. (Other ideas include: MIDI-based adaptations for audio, vector-based adaptations for video, natural language processing-based adaptations for text, etc.)
This is Just the Beginning
Other random bits about teia.cafe you might find interesting:
- We got rid of most of our custom icons and just replaced them with emojis. The idea was to maintain visual consistency between the user and icons they should already be familiar with. The rendition of the dApp will vary from person to person, depending on their operating system, browser, carrier and device.
- More of a disclaimer - this project has no official ties to Hic et Nunc, Teia.art , or the TEIA's non-profit DAO, though Ryan is a founding member of the DAO as an individual. ( All verifiable on-chain . This wallet is actually connected to the DAO directly, if you look.)
- The 🕊 emoji is used for the disconnect button, which symbolizes your freedom and autonomy from the app itself. Probably influenced from my ambient music background - my philosophy is that people should come and go as they please - and listen to the music as they need or want. Because the blockchain is global, you can always come back at any time.
Well, that about covers most of it, at least for now. If you're reading this - by now it's very likely that teia.cafe has left the "stealth" phase and is in open-testing/open-beta now. This is a new project with a very small team (currently mostly me and a few part-time developers) so there is still a lot of testing and debugging to be done. (Report bugs/issues to @ryangtanaka on Twitter if you see anything.)
But in a way, it's not actually that new since my agenda has always been to help get artists paid and reimagine the way we create and enjoy art as a whole. That's the whole reason why I got into crypto in 2014, after all - almost a decade later, the agenda itself hasn't changed. 🕊