MoneyLab: Art, Culture and Financial Activism
Saturday 20 January 2018 @ River Rooms, New Wing, Somerset House, London
MoneyLab is a thematic series of conferences, workshops and (online) publications that provides an open framework for a broader critique of global finance and a speculative exploration of the production of financial alternatives.
Since its first conference in 2015 MoneyLab#1: Coining Alternatives, it has established itself as a stimulating environment, bringing together critical artists, designers and researchers to collectively explore the intersections where financial activism and contemporary art meet digital culture. With this year’s edition MoneyLab left its base at the Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam to explore decentralized financial technologies within old infrastructures of the world’s financial center: London.
Image Panel: Playing to Lose: Gameplay in Art and Finance moderated by Brett Scott with Stephanie Polskyand, Andy Morales Coto and Kei Kreutler.
Panels and talks provided engaging food for thought. Sarah Friend, for instance, presented clickmine, her blockchain based clicker game within which both the metaphor of mining and the materiality of tokens are explored visually. Each time the player clicks, she ‘mines’ 20 tokens on the Ethereum network and ‘mines’ visibly a virtual lot of land – until all land is gone.
The design strategist Andrea Morales Coto provided insight on her distributed economics design project. I Owe Us was inspired by the Berkshares (the largest local currency in the United States) and led to the development of an infrastructure for local currencies that is deeply tied to the idiosyncrasy of the community and its geographical location. With the help of playful methods and the engagement of the local community, I Owe Us makes economies accessible for public understanding and action.
The Demystification Committee engaged with questions surrounding the infrastructures of offshores and tax havens. In their workshop Offshore Investigation Vehicle the Committee reveled to the participants how they had set up an international corporate structure to understand the practice of tax heavens in a DIY logic.
Image Kei Kreutler, researcher, designer and developer presents the augmented reality game for urban research PATTERNIST, which was developed collaboratively at Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture, and Design in Moscow.
In the afternoon, FairCoop explained the development, technical elements as well as political and social motives behind the first co-operative model based eco-friendly crypto-currency :: the FairCoin.
In the end of a long and intense day, Inte Cloerich launched the Institute of Network Cultures’ MoneyLab Reader vol. 2 Overcoming the Hype.
Surprisingly, contributor artist and Goldsmiths lecturer, Emily Rosamond, somehow managed to excite our hyperstimulated minds with her engaging thoughts on “what it would mean to try to theorise a surveillance capitalist aesthetic. One that understands surveillance capitalism not entirely in the terms according to the present moment, but as part of a much longer trajectory, according to which artworks and narratives rework the temporalities at the meeting point between financial and monetary systems and subjectivities.”
Image Presentation by games designer & design strategist Andrea ‚Andy‘ Morales Coto
I am excited to see MoneyLab crossing the pond later this year! Watch out MoneyLab#5: Matters of Currency goes Buffalo, NY, USA — 27–28 April 2018!
With confirmed speakers: Jason Moore, Terra0, Cassie Thornton, Max Haiven, Fran Illich, Gabriela Ceja, Patricia de Vries, Leigh Claire La Berge, Caroline Woolard, Brett Scott, and Caitlin Blanchfield
Watch the videos online/Mailinglist/Twitter