TRANSFER DATA TRUST COOPERATIVE

Written by Kelani Nichole

Founders:
Artists: Carla Gannis (NYC), Huntrezz Janos (LA), Lorna Mills (Toronto), Rosa Menkman (Amsterdam), Eva Papamargariti (Athens)
Caretakers: Kelani Nichole (NYC), Regina Harsanyi (NYC), Wade Wallerstein (SF)
Industry: Contemporary Art
Website: https://transfer.art/trust/

In one sentence, how would you describe your cooperative?
Artist-owned Data Cooperative focused on preservation of experimental media art.

What is the mission of your cooperative and what do you hope to achieve?
Our mission is to cooperatively maintain artworks in perpetuity, ensuring their preservation and access across generations. We manage and grow the value of digital assets by leveraging decentralized storage and encryption. Backed by a network of care, our model offers a new approach to media art conservation, valuation, and data stewardship.

What are the types of member classes in your cooperative?
Artist Members commit their artwork inventory to the cooperative, stake artist proofs as assets, and receive annual disbursements while participating in governance and data maintenance.
Caretaker Members provide curatorial and conservation support through studio visits and reporting and help maintain data infrastructure, with disbursement eligibility starting after two years of membership.

What are the benefits for individuals/businesses who become members of your coop?
Artists benefit from the decentralized data stewardship infrastructure the coop is developing, and have access to resources to help promote and maintain their artworks. Artist proofs held as assets in the cooperative are proactively maintained by Caretaker members, and their value is appraised on a bi-annual basis. This offers a form of assurance to collectors and institutions that are investing in complex variable media artworks, by offering continued updates and proactive conservation treatments. Archiving is a lonely activity; through participation in the co-op model, artists are in community with a group of peers that are invested in ensuring their work lasts the next 100 years..

How do you keep things fun and exciting for your members while still running a business?
Monthly membership meetings are personal and facilitated as a group studio visit, making space for ideas and creative exchange while also covering administrative needs, updates and governance decisions.

What challenges have you faced in running your cooperative?
We are a newly formed cooperative, at the start of our journey. We took an extended period of time to design and test our bylaws together through meetings and roleplaying, focusing on simplicity to start, with built-in flexibility as we grow. Jacque from JWPC was an excellent guide in helping us think through the tensions that might emerge as the coop membership scales.

What makes your cooperative stand out in terms of services/products?
As a Data Co-op our governance model is structured around data stewardship practices, which includes maintaining both a hardware and software infrastructure. We are uniquely positioned to think about data valuation and growing creator equity, with the co-op’s overlapping focus in data infrastructure and contemporary art market economics. Artists are often at the forefront of big shifts in culture, and we hope this co-op model is a tangible example of the new data economy that is emerging as an alternative to centralized tech monopolies. Our most recent experiments are focused on artist-owned AI models that benefit creators instead of big tech.

If your cooperative had a theme song, what would it be?
“Changes,” by David Bowie.

How is your coop helping to “Build a Better World?”
AI is transforming our lives, fueled by hyper-extractive data practices. Quality data is needed for better AI: a shared ownership model ensures those who generate data share its benefits. Cooperation and decentralized ownership incentivizes quality, trustworthy data, ethical AI development and fairer outcomes for contributors. We are exploring how we can return value to the people, communities, and organizations that steward data, ensuring individuals have a voice, a choice, and a stake in their digital lives.

 

Each month in 2025 we will spotlight a different cooperative as part of our celebration and support for the UN’s International Year of Cooperatives.