TL;DR: Intermedial is an attempt at simulating how Anoma’s intent-centric architecture enables qualified peer-to-peer discovery in non-economic contexts. It simulates an artist marketplace where text-holders, video-holders, music-holders, and nonhuman modulators discover compatible counterparties through constraint-based matching, showcasing two-party, multiparty, and interspecies coordination patterns.
The application explores a specific use case: intermedia creation through intent matching. Participants declare what media they have (literary texts, archival video, music, sensor data) and what they seek, with constraints that enable qualified matching rather than naive broadcast-and-hope discovery.
For example (note that, for the simulation, open archive works have been used - a live application would involve original works submitted by users):
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A holder of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass broadcasts: “I have poetry with tags [nature, optimistic, philosophical] seeking video with constraints [nature, expansive, documentary, pastoral]”
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A holder of 1970s nature documentary footage broadcasts: “I have video with tags [nature, documentary, pastoral, expansive] seeking text with constraints [nature, optimistic, philosophical]”
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The solver identifies high compatibility and facilitates the pairing
The result is a live channel where both media stream together — a realized collaboration neither party could have coordinated without qualified discovery.
The demo simulates three types of discovery:
Two-Party Discovery (yellow border channels): Simple bilateral matching where one text intent pairs with one video intent. Demonstrates basic constraint satisfaction and preference matching.
Multiparty Discovery (red border channels): Virginia Woolf’s The Waves matches with video + ambient music. Three intents must align simultaneously, requiring the solver to satisfy multiple constraint sets and coordinate across three counterparties.
Nonhuman Discovery (purple border channels): G.W.M. Reynolds’ gothic werewolf novel pairs with surrealist film + simulated gray wolf GPS tracking data. The wolf’s activity state (resting/traveling/hunting/territorial) modulates which text passages display, demonstrating how nonhuman agents can participate in intent-based systems.
Artists and designers will immediately see the potential here for much more complex artworks, massive multiparty intermedia (MMI?) projects, or groundbreaking Fluxus/John Cage style games of nonhuman/interspecies/stochastic art production.
Economic design friends might see the potential for trust networks - a reputation mechanism which would create opportunity for mutual liquidity provisioning with the artist or art-collective’s tokens, sophisticated NFT’s with royalties generated from dependency graphs.
I haven’t considered in-depth the implications of Anoma’s zero knowledge infrastructure for this use case, but one could imagine high profile MMI with political content.
Eager for feedback here: what am I getting wrong about how Anoma would work for a use case like this? What are some obvious implications I may be missing?