Why I’m in Texas for a Month: The Creator Cabins Residency
From now until mid-October, I’ve relocated from Toronto to the Texas Hill Country for the Creator Residency.
The Container cabin
Creator Cabin residents work on a creative project of their choice for a month — here’s mine — with lodging and food expenses sponsored by a group of people called CabinDAO (more on that later).
The application process itself is straightforward:
Submit a Twitter thread or a Google form on the project the applicant plans to do over the month.
CabinDAO members vote on their favourites.
The top 4 applications win.
The process happened quickly for me.
While on vacation in August, off grid about 800 km south of the Arctic Circle, I received an email about the residency opportunity. Praying the wifi wouldn’t disconnect, I banged out my application in a few hours and submitted it as a public Notion page.
Back home in Toronto a week later, this DM hit my inbox:
The 2 weeks that followed was a mad scramble to get a COVID test in my nostrils and the dust off my passport, and for my brain to understand that I’ll be meeting virtual friends IRL for the first time in Creator Cabins.
Creator Cabins is a set of 4 conjoined suites built from recycled shipping containers. It’s located in a 28-acre plot of land in the Texas Hill Country, about 45 minutes outside of Austin. The property is owned by Jon Hillis, a founding member of CabinDAO – the organization that finances and supports the Creator Cabins Residency and its residents.
CabinDAO is a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). Kinda like a corporation where the members are all volunteers, working towards a shared purpose. In CabinDAO’s case, the purpose is a vision of the future where meat- and cyberspace communities coexist.
At the 10,000-ft. level, the Creator Residency is a wild, optimistic experiment on the power of human creativity and ingenuity. It’s a bet that while creative communities will always thrive in physical locations distributed worldwide, web3 technology will allow them to collaborate on shared projects.
This, my friends, is the real explanation for what I mean when I say that nice folks from Twitter are sponsoring me to go to Texy and “do my writing thing” for a month. 😂
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