The Humans of The Open Web Sandbox is a series that provides a small background behind the contributors engaging with the NEAR ecosystem through The Open Web Sandbox. This edition’s character profile is Chloe Curiel/Coyote_F_Ugly. So, who is Chloe and what does her journey to the Open Web Sandbox team look like?
Artistic pursuits: nature or nurture?
Chloe is first and foremost an artist. Her focus is multimedia installation art: images, projections, and sculptures. Recently returning from travelling, Chloe has reverted to her creative work environment to continue creating artistic content for the blockchain community. But how did Chloe start her artistic journey?
Chloe’s creative personality began during her childhood, when she lived on a colourfully painted 80’s school bus with her parents. During the three years of travelling the United States, Chloe began utilizing the scarce and unconventional materials found on her journeys to create sculptures:
This passion for creation was encouraged by her equally creative parents during her formative years, leading her to pursue a Studio Arts degree.
From artistic to digital nomad
Chloe now lives in Austin and is co-founder of the Swine Guild, a guild of the NEAR Protocol. How did she get into the industry and what led her to where she is now?
The first time Chloe heard of the word ‘blockchain’ was through a friend who had a start-up that used blockchain technology for security reasons:
Coincidentally, not long after, someone approached her to do some graphic design work for the Rainbow Bridge launch for the NEAR Protocol, a blockchain!
Chloe was interested to join the team but was unsure of her experience in graphic design and interest in the still ambiguously understood blockchain world. It still stands as a pleasant surprise to her that after only 10 days of accepting the offer she was already in Europe and Turkey meeting the team. After overcoming a challenging but exciting learning curve, both in graphic design and blockchain fundamentals, Chloe grew a passion for the technology and most importantly grew a distinct and appreciated creative process and style for her artistic digital content.
Chloe and her friend began making memes as a hobby to humorously capture the current affairs and developments within the NEAR ecosystem. This led a member of the NEAR team to encourage the duo to start a community based meme guild focused on creating memes. Chloe saw a need in the NEAR community for a creative edge and took the idea on board; the aim was to enhance the internet culture by making it more fun. This led to the establishment of the Swine Guild, of which she is a co-founder. Chloe enjoys the educational aspect of memes, as their goal is to capture and describe concepts, projects, and events creatively, but most importantly, humorously. The creative control over the community culture they want to create keeps her artistic personality alive. While the freedom of direction the founders have over the guild allows Chloe to use her creativeness in a managerial sense.
NEAR, the Sandbox, and memes
Chloe is appreciative of the NEAR Core community and hopes to expand its creative edge by expanding its reach to more international demographics. Chloe expresses the new challenge of coordinating the humor and direction of the memes for diverse cultures and contexts, “there is a strong artistic side to this evaluation”. The current goal for Chloe is to increase funding so as to expand the international community of meme makers and develop a more structured and scalable quality control system.
As Chloe explains, not everyone will like all content, not everyone will get it, not everyone will be kind about it, but Chloe is dedicated to the memes’ importance to increase accessibility — sometimes targeted accessibility for artistic nuance:
As she explains, most negative comments come from people outside of the NEAR community. This encourages Chloe to see the negativity as valuable constructive critique to improve their appeal to outsiders and newcomers.
Having started at 4NTS before the Open Web Sandbox started, Chloe has witnessed and contributed to the development of the Sandbox with content creation and infographics. From her point of view, the Sandbox is the microcosm of the NEAR macro universe. The sandbox facilitates collaboration and allocation. This helps develop a NEAR brand that is beyond what NEAR Core define themselves as. The community feature themselves by bottom-up creative development. Since its inception, Chloe highlights the enormous and consistent increase in expansion in the Sandbox and looks forward to new opportunities for those within and outside of the NEAR community.
Chloe’s future aims are to expand the platforms in which the memes are exposed to so as to increase community engagement within and outside of the Sandbox.
Her focus is to use the Sandbox to advertise to the community the opportunities available for creative content creation.
Chloe is a great example of how creative skills can be applied in unconventional contexts. If you are a creative, whether a digital one or not, the OWS can be a great tool to find the right opportunities and develop digital skills in a growing and forward thinking community.
Discord: coyotefugly#1527
Twitter: https://twitter.com/SwineGuild
Personal Website: https://www.chloecurielmaking.com/installation
Swine Guild website:https://www.swineguild.com/
If you would like to know more about Sandbox: https://nearguilds.com/sandbox/
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