Omnivium

Archive, Monetization, Democratization

This thesis explores the potential of a democratized Meta-Archive in facilitating user-driven curation and establishing a new value system for architectural design that emphasizes collaboration, accessibility, and interconnectedness, rather than scarcity. Set within the context of intellectual property law and emerging technologies, this research examines the legal, ethical, and technological implications of such a platform, aiming to discover how architecture students can assert their intellectual property rights, receive fair compensation for their work, and promote a more interconnected and collaborative design culture.

Challenging conventional notions of curation and scarcity, the democratized Meta-Archive represents a paradigm shift in the way architectural design is experienced and valued. The project focuses on user interaction and experience, enabling users to curate Archive Fields through a series of questions. These galleries are then added to an ever-growing archive that can be explored by others. Unlike social media feeds, which prioritize individual showcase and follower count, this gallery emphasizes collective ownership and knowledge sharing within a community, fostering a more immersive, interactive, and user-driven experience.

The research targets the educational context over the World Wide Web (WWW) to emphasize

architecture students' intellectual property rights and foster a more interconnected and collaborative design culture within architectural institutions. This approach encourages a deeper understanding of architectural design principles and enables students to assert their rights while engaging in peer-to-peer learning and cooperation.

Drawing inspiration from Daniel Arsham's Snarkitecture, Ray and Charles Eames IBM Pavilion, and Jacques Derrida's Archive Fever, the project is situated in the Metaverse, where the archive exists as a context-less virtual realm, separate from any existing virtual world or plot of land. Operating in both the real and virtual world, the project focuses on user experience from a human perspective, with the infinite nature of the archive allowing for an expansion beyond the planetary scale.

Distinct from NFT communities that emphasize monetization and trading of digital assets, the Meta-Archive underscores knowledge sharing, collaboration, and user-driven curation. It empowers students by allowing them to assert their intellectual property rights and receive fair compensation for their work, providing a more immersive and interactive experience where users can explore and inhabit virtual galleries. Through the process of minting, the world itself is given a monetary value, ownership stake will be established through a White Paper and verified through a POAP.

The world of Omnivium is a series of floating rock islands that are the perfect soil mixture of collaboration and creativity to grow an architectural archive from. The Meta-Archive is at the center housing the full catalog of work, creating a gravitational pull to the personal archive fields orbiting around it.

Throughout the thesis semester, the project involves collecting and scanning student work to build an archive, designing portals for user interaction between the physical and virtual realms, and developing archive design to connect all content. Archived work will grow out from circular fields of digital soil.

Architecture students and the public are the primary stakeholders in the project, as they create and interact with the content, respectively. The intended audience is the discipline of architecture, particularly architectural institutions. A Monaverse will host the project, allowing users to create their galleries through an interface that offers multiple-choice questions. The interface, with both virtual and physical manifestations, will be accompanied by two displays: one showcasing the overall archive, and another displaying individual galleries post-creation.

In conclusion, this thesis investigates the potential of a democratized Meta-Archive to facilitate user-driven curation, define a new value system for architectural design, and empower architecture students to assert their intellectual property rights while promoting an interconnected, collaborative design culture.

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Samson Levi

Omnivium

Archive, Monetization, Democratization