To structure the collaborative processes of Museu XYZ, the theoretical–methodological framework of the study Collective Wisdom: Co-Creating Media for Equity and Justice, developed by the MIT Open Documentary Lab under the leadership of Cizek and Uricchio (2019) and Cizek et al. (2022), was employed. This study challenges the romantic notion of the solitary author, proposing cocreation as an ethical and practical alternative for media production in a complex world.

The museum’s operations are structured around three core areas: 1. exhibitions, festivals, and events; 2. education; and 3.collection and memory (Cunha, 2022). The museum’s exhibitions articulate a distributed curatorial ecosystem that, from 2022 onward, combines within the Distrito XYZ (Figure 1) the Genesis Gallery (housing the collection of pioneers of Brazilian crypto art, Figure 2) with spaces dedicated to “resident” artists and collectives such as Feminudao (2022), Cryptoserrao (2022), Fra_dao (2022), SocialCryptoart (2020), NFTrans (2023), Arafah (2023), Cunha et al. (2023a), Cunha et al. (2023b), Cunha et al. (2025), and Cunha et al. (2021).

The cocreation in Museu XYZ was analysed under three perspectives adapted from the MIT model (Cizek et al., 2022):

Cocreation within the community: A symbiotic relationship established through a process of meetings and reflections with the CriptoArteBr movement and diverse collectives, in which the museum’s guidelines were discussed and shaped by the artists and collaborators.

Based on these three points, mediation can be understood as a political and pedagogical action that unfolds into processes of media literacy and the onboarding of artists into emerging technologies. Mediation as a political action creates the notion of militant mediation (Queiroz, 2018; Queiroz, 2022), that is, the role played by institutions as learning sites and as protagonists in fostering connections between art and audiences, and, in the case of Museu XYZ, between art and digital culture using emerging technologies such as AI and XR.

At Museu XYZ, the decision to operate across multiple platforms is guided by access criteria, persistence, participation, and democratization, as well as by synchronous experiences of mediation and training. This arrangement seeks to expand reach and engagement, consolidating Museu XYZ as both a creative district and a creative laboratory. The creation of the Distrito XYZ enabled the implementation of a logic of “planned neighborhood” or “creative district.” The galleries are not isolated; instead, they share courtyards, walkways, programming, events, and communal spaces.

The museum’s holdings and collections are conceived from two perspectives. First, they are a contemporary digital heritage and a memory of Brazilian cryptoart. Moreover, they can be seen from a design perspective, since exhibitions are works of art and part of the collection.

As a memory, the genesis of Museu XYZ is linked to the movement CriptoArteBr (Mendes amd Silva, 2024; Silva, 2025), a community centered on self-learning and exchange that initiated in the second half of 2020 on Telegram by six to eight artists and, after 3 months, achieved 800 participants from all over the world on Discord. Within the context of movement, Museu XYZ established the Genesis Gallery (Figure 2), which serves as one of the museum’s collections and as a permanent exhibition to safeguard and display works by the “pioneers” (Original Gangsters - OGs) of Brazilian cryptoart.

As a form of design, exhibitions can be understood as works of art, as evidenced by creative projects that build virtual worlds. As shown in Figure 3, this understanding of the museum space as a work of art becomes more explicit in the exhibition Feminudao (2022), inspired by the work of Lina Bo Bardi (Instituto Bardi, 2025) and also by the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand - Masp (Google Arts and Culture, 2025).

One of the main findings of this investigation was the role of these “residents” in making this ecosystem more dynamic. The Museu XYZ hosts and incubates collectives that operate as Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), fostering processes that prioritize decentralized curatorship, increased creativity, and greater diversity through a social application of blockchain technology. This curatorial ecosystem serves as a mini-tutorial for those who seek to dive into this universe. Moreover, several Museu XYZ’s exhibitions are created as NFTs, enabling them to be reconfigured after each presentation or even during the event. Each exhibition project introduces its own aesthetic configuration, developed through creative, artistic, and technological experimentation.

In addition to artistic “residencies,” the museum develops hybrid educational programs—such as Ocupação Metaverso e Arte (Metaverse Occupation and Art) in the Museu XYZ (2023)—aimed at promoting inclusion and literacy in new technologies. This hybrid configuration unfolds synchronously, with participation taking place both online, across different digital platforms, and in physical spaces.

In 2023, aiming to deeply experiment with Virtual Reality (VR) and AI, the exhibition Amazônia e Arte Emergentes (Emergent Amazon and Art) was held, bringing together 17 works by 18 artists (including collectives) in an online 3D environment connected to blockchain technology, with submissions in NFT as well as other digital formats such as videos, GIFs, and related media (Guimarães et al., 2024). The curatorial approach was designed to support the onboarding of new actors and to foster participatory mediation. The XR experience takes place on the Spatial platform, accessible via web browsers, mobile devices, and VR headsets (Oculus), with synchronous activations (such as a premiere with a countdown and guided tours) that transform the audience into participants and reinforce the immersive dimension of mediation in these events as the “heart” of the metaverse.

Figure 4 presents a hybrid event held on the launching day, organized by the artist Matheus Moreno at Laboratório Interdisciplinar Interativo (LabInter–Universidade Federal de Santa Maria/UFSM), in which public could visit the exhibition and interact with other artists in the metaverse via a computer in the laboratory’s lobby, via Oculus Quest 2 VR headsets, or on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. During this event, it became clearer that there was a transition from artworks to the exhibition design through the use of XR, AI, and algorithms. In other words, technological advances in platforms enable XR applications powered by AI, expanding interactive and participatory experiences. This investigation’s results show that Museu XYZ, since its conception, has operated through cocreation (Uricchio and Cizek, 2022) and radical collaboration among artists and collectives. Unlike traditional museums, where curatorship is centralized and hierarchical, the Museu XYZ distributes curatorial authority across the network, allowing artists, audiences, and collectives to design the institution’s identity.

An installation created in collaboration with Funkeiros Cults (2025), a youth collective based in the first Indigenous neighborhood in the city of Manaus, in the urban Amazon is an example of Storyliving in Virtual Reality (VR) design (Vallance and Towndrow, 2022) that fosters creativity, this exhibition featured. The cultural collective gained visibility on social media by blending humor, funk, and high culture (literature, cinema, philosophy), using memes that combine classical books with funk aesthetics to discuss peripheral realities and access to culture.

For this exhibition, through eight weekly meetings, the museum team collaborated with the collective to produce six 360-degree photographic images that narrate aspects of the youths’ lives, including Indigenous art, everyday life in the neighborhood, and the taturana ritual (also known as the bullet ant ritual), an initiation ceremony into adulthood practiced by the Sateré-Mawé Indigenous people of the Amazon. In this ritual, young participants place their hands into woven gloves filled with dozens of ants, symbolizing courage, strength, and the transition to maturity. This marked the collective’s first virtual exhibition, and in the installation’s creation, AI and XR technologies were employed.

The Museu XYZ operates as a creative district that strengthens Brazil’s digital art community, connecting Brazilian artists distributed across multiple countries within the same—albeit virtual—territory. An analysis of the activities of the Socialcrypto.art DAO, for example, demonstrates how cutting-edge technologies (XR and AI) can be appropriated for locally grounded social impact (favelas), subverting the notion of the metaverse as a space of alienation.