The lifecycle of a creative work on Artfork.

Plant a seed

Every work starts as a private draft. Give it a title, a discipline, a brief. Choose whether to open it for grafts. Nothing is visible to anyone else yet — this is your incubation space.

• Supported disciplines: Music · Film · Documentary · Dance · Performance · Photography · Visual Arts · Craft Design · Publishing · Spoken Word
• For photography: publishes directly to the Stage without a Nursery phase
• For film and documentary: opens the dedicated V2 Studio (script editor, stripboard, call sheets)

Open the nursery

The Nursery is the only phase where grafts can be proposed. Collaborators see your seed on the Workshop billboard and propose branches — each with a suggested equity split. You negotiate, counter, and sign.

• Grafts are proposals: branch type, role, equity percentage — all negotiable before signing
• Branch creator auto-signs their split; seed creator countersigns
• Once all parties have signed, the equity row is locked — immutable
• The Nursery stays open until you manually close it, or all slots are filled

Collaborate

Grafting closes. The team builds the work — in the Studio for film and documentary projects, or offline in DAWs, editing suites, and studios for everything else. The ledger is final before this phase begins.

• Film / documentary: V2 Studio gives the full production suite — Fountain script editor, shooting schedule, call sheets, cast extraction, coverage board, footage logger
• Music / visual arts / publishing: external tools, Artfork holds the attribution and will embed the result
• The signed equity ledger follows the work regardless of where it was made

Goes public, wherever that means

A finished work can go public on the Stage, inside a curated Series, Contest, or Exhibition run through Artfork's Event Manager, or on an external platform where its audience already is. Artfork doesn't require one path. The equity ledger stays attached wherever the work goes, and revenue routes automatically for anything sold through Artfork's own marketplace, events, or platform embeds.

• External platform embeds supported: Bandcamp · SoundCloud · Vimeo · YouTube · Spotify
• Direct upload to the Stage is available for image, audio, PDF, and EPUB works (up to 2 GB)
• Video hosting is not offered directly. Use an embed link from an external platform, or bring the work into a curated Series, Contest, or Exhibition through the Event Manager instead.

Take root on the Stage

The work takes root. It's public, it's permanent, and it's attributed. The Stage is Artfork's public gallery — sorted by vitality, filterable by media type and discipline. Revenue distributed through the wallet routes to every signed equity holder.

• The Stage groups works by media type: Watch · Listen · View · Read
• Vitality score reflects collaborative depth, cross-discipline branches, and patron growth — not raw follower count
• Every revenue distribution is atomic and idempotent: the ledger never double-pays

THE WALLET

Revenue flows through the signed ledger.

When a work generates revenue — from streaming, patron support, edition sales — the Artfork wallet distributes it automatically across every signed equity holder, including the Sap.

Every distribution is atomic: one call, one Postgres transaction, every recipient credited simultaneously. Safe to retry — already-paid recipients are skipped.

TERROIR

Geographic identity, not metadata.

Terroir is the place a creative work comes from — not where it was distributed. A seed from Vientiane is different from one from Lagos, even if both live on Spotify.

Artists set their Terroir on their profile. Seeds inherit it from their creator. It appears on every card, every seed page, every branch in the genealogy tree.