Hi, I'm

Arkadiy Kukarkin

I am a multi-disciplinary practicioner interested in the relationship between creative labor and reward, the nature of value, and in designing systems that support expression without compromising intent. I also maintain a deep belief in the power of music and the broader sound experience, despite the many challenges of the contemporary music-industrial complex.

I hope that we can still consider matters like this with care, even as the environmental crisis rightfully commands more and more of our attention.

Here are a few things that I’ve worked on:

Current

• IPFS Collaborations Coordinator @ Protocol Labs
  Protocol Labs aspires to be something like a Bell Labs for the decentralized web, and to guide the next 50 years of networked technologies, much as the original at Murray Hill helped define the past half-century. My role is to build relationships with organizations looking to explore the decentralized space, and to find ways to bring the Interplanetary Filesystem from the lab into the real world.
• Advisor @ Ampled
  Ampled is a new kind of artist support platform built on some very old ideas: it doesn’t just promise to promote the interests of creators + fans, but actively encodes this committment in a co-operative organization structure. I’m advising Ampled alongside Yancey Strickler (co-founder Kickstarter).
• Sound/Installation/Event Design @ self, Culinary Arts @ world

Selected Projects

• Remembering Network with Sarah Friend (sound design, supercollider programming, physical installation) (shown at DWeb Camp, IPFS Camp, Radical Networks, Our Networks, DevCon, etc)
• Untitled A/V Project with vaporstack (sound design, supercollider programming, live performance) at Brahman AI
• Distributed Gardens at the Decentralized Internet Archive with Dan Taeyoung, Melanie Hoff, et al (production assistance, garden programming) (shown at DWeb Summit 2018)
• Decentralized Internet Archive with Mitra Ardron (IPFS Integration)
• DWeb Camp 2019 (production assistance, multimodal exploration game, space stewardship)
• IPFS Camp 2019 (sci-fi fair curation)
• Decentralized Web Summit 2018 (tech track curation, creative uses track, production assistance, talk on decentralizing Internet Archive)
• Mediachain Attribution Engine (overall design)

Past

• Creator Services + Special Projects @ Spotify (2018) (technical/product leadership, mentorship, pipeline design, infrastructure, MR)
  After the acquisition (it may help to read these upwards from the bottom), the Mediachain team was tasked with (1) building tools to help smaller labels navigate the digital streaming landscape and (2) parsing the incredibly messy world of songwriting metadata/getting the right people paid. These efforts resulted in the (creatively named) "Spotify Analytics for Labels" and "Spotify Publishing Analytics", respectively. I led the Labels team and worked on the pipeline design for Publishing.
• CTO @ Mediachain Labs (2015-2017) (architecture design, technical leadership, hiring, infrastructure, ML supervision, smart contracts)
  Mediachain was an early, ambitious, and slightly quixotic effort at creating a "Universal Media Library" leveraging the then-nascent new wave of decentralized tech. It began as a kind of "Shazam for images" and slowly grew into a way to seamlessly interconnect media metadata systems on a global scale, with the ultimate goal of breaking open data silos and making monopolies impossible. Ask me how this went over a beer (I promise there were good reasons for the name). Acquired by Spotify.
• GIS + Superuser Tools @ Foursquare (2014-2015) (geocoder work, tool design, Scala/JS development, pipelines)
  For arcane historical reasons, in the mid-2010s a single, small team at Foursquare was responsible for geospatial information, venue database, spam filtering, photo ranking, data quality, and the "superuser tools" (i.e. the tooling that allows diligent volunteers to correct the opening hours of your corner coffee shop), i.e. a good part of the Foursquare core. At different times I constituted between 20% and 33% of this team.
• Many Hats @ The Hype Machine (...-2014) (core PHP/JS development, popularity/discovery algorithm design, community-centered design, infrastructure)
  My one true love. Hype Machine was probably one of the most important forces in the mid-late aughts independent music mini-renaissance, despite having taken no VC funding, employing no more than 5 people at a time, and firmly rejecting typical music industry payola shenanigans (how many tried!). The design of every part of the site (including the coveted Popular page) actively resisted the dark patterns already taking root across the industry, shunning the more-of-the-same, winner-take-all, optimization black hole path to easy success gleefully pursued by most media juggernauts. Hype Machine currently lives on as a community-supported project.

Elsewhere

GitHub Twitter