Transport & standing
We pay to bring proven infrastructure to the site: trailers, shade structures, power, kitchens, rigging, sound, tools, the whole unglamorous spine of a camp that works. Fuel, freight, storage, and the crew hours to load it.
Document 004 · the founding call
Founding
Worlds
It took another event forty years to grow its infrastructure. We do not have forty years, and we do not need them — because that infrastructure already exists, in storage units and back lots and shipping containers, owned by people who already know how to do this.
Founding Worlds pays to move it. Then it pays to build something that has never existed.
How the grants work
Three grants, one condition, and one promise about ownership.
The thing you've never built
A second, larger grant for the piece you have been describing to people for years and could never afford to attempt. It has to be new. Bringing your greatest hit qualifies you for Grant 01, not this one.
The newcomers' reserve
A fixed share of every funding round — never less than a quarter — is reserved for people who have never run a camp or shown work at an event like this. Otherwise the city becomes a tribute band of another city.
Build to the module
Most work lands in one standard bay — container or RV footprint, scaffold façade, power and data drop, published attachment points. Four hundred teams build in parallel and nobody has to understand the whole ship. The module standard
It has to do something
Funded work must do something with a stranger who walks up to it: give them a task, a choice, a role, a secret, a problem, a job. Beautiful objects are welcome in the city. Beautiful objects alone are not what this fund is for.
You keep your work
You keep title to what you build. The city receives defined, written display and documentation rights for a defined term — not ownership, not exclusivity, not a claim on what you do with it afterwards.
Nothing is awarded yet
Capital is still forming, and we will not pretend otherwise. Applications open now so the first dollar raised has a real queue to go to, chosen on merit, in public. City status
Read this before applying
No grant has been awarded. No money has been raised publicly. No site exists. There is no date. An application creates no obligation on either side, and we cannot tell you when the first round closes, because that depends on capital we do not yet have.
What an application does buy you: a place in the first review, and a direct line to the people making these decisions while the decisions are still soft.
What we are looking for
Six kinds of people, all of them urgently.
Theme camps & collectives
Groups who already hold space, feed people, and build worlds — with or without a trailer full of history. Tell us what your camp does to a person, not what it looks like.
Artists, fabricators & roboticists
Monumental sculpture, kinetic machines, fire art, mutant vehicles, animatronics, impossible furniture, things that move when nobody is watching.
Theater-makers & game designers
Immersive and site-specific theater, LARP and alternate-reality designers, puzzle builders, escape-room makers, improvisers who can hold a character for six days. The narrative spine of the city gets built by you or it does not get built.
Crew who have done it before
Operations, safety, medical, fire, gate, power, water, sanitation, heavy equipment, volunteer coordination. Unglamorous, decisive, and the difference between a city and an incident.
Land & jurisdiction
Working off-road and motorsport parks, ranches, private event grounds, and the people who know which county will actually permit a temporary city — and which will not, and why. The specification
Patrons & operators
People who fund art at scale, and people who have run large events and know what this costs. Nothing is on sale here; these are conversations, not a round.