Wherever you look, money is being replaced by tokens. Digital platforms are issuing new kinds of money-like things: phone credit, shares, gift vouchers, game tokens, customer data, etc. But what does it mean when online platforms become the new banks?
Category Archive: money
From the politics of proxies to space extractivism and the commodification of the commons, including citizenship by investment and the art market, everything indicates that “offshore governance” has become the norm…
Post-Capital presents works by artists who explore the aesthetics, paradoxes, absurdities and ethical questions posed by post-industrial and perhaps post-capital economies
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What happens when you short-circuit capitalism and nationalism? What if freedom of movement, if human rights become nothing but a USP and national border regimes can be bargained away, like in a casino?
While sparsely occupied ultra-thin “pencil towers” develop in our cities, functioning as speculative wealth storage for the superrich and cavernous “iceberg” homes extend architectural assets many stories below street level, communities around the globe are blighted by zombie and ghost urbanism, marked by unoccupied neighbourhoods and abandoned housing developments
Can the values that blockchain makes possible -such as transparency, sharing of resources and equal access to information- be applied to how the art world thinks and functions?
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The artists who opened their own bank, printed their own money and then bought £1 million worth of predatory debts, which were then blown up in the shadow of London’s financial district
Value is classically said to stem from human labour, and money to represent this value. Does the idea still hold true today? Can we create an alternative cryptocurrency based on laziness? Can we turn Bitcoin into a stable currency ?
For this dive into new forms of financial delinquency, investigative journalist Anuška Delić discussed with investigative artists from the Demystification Committee and the collective RYBN.ORG
The artist’s critical approach to technology can be found in works such as an orchestra of musical instruments that mine for Bitcoins, a 3D printable kit to cut undersea internet cables, a Bitcoin mining machine that claims to be worst in the world, etc.
The installation reveals the mechanisms of the blockchain as much as it challenges their promises and limits. It also raises questions about art funding, authorship, value systems, decentralised sharing economies, wealth distribution and many more issues
Pip Thornton”s work explores linguistic capitalism and the economic, cultural and political effects of the monetisation of language by Google’s search and advertising platforms
The untold story of digital cash and its creators—from experiments in the 1970s to the mania over Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies
The book “combines artistic explorations, biological theories and perspectives from the social realm” to investigate how the current economic model could be reshaped
LIFE SPORT sells grey sweatpants at a reasonable price to anyone in need of a leisure item. The artists then invest the money earned in exhibitions they organize with other artists
Together artists, designers, curators, scientists and philosophers delved into technodiversity, contemporary utopias and dystopias, the future of money, Glitch Feminism and cultural resistance, and the human-technology relationship from an artistic, philosophical and scientific point of view
At MUTEK_IMG in Montreal, i got to hear some very interesting and, at times, provocative ideas about artificial intelligence, post-truth media, human-machine choreography and automated storytelling tools
Goldin+Senneby’s artworks uncover something of the shrouded relationships between art and money, while also spinning further fictions from them
Breath (BRH) explores how the body can perform the computational process of mining crypto-currencies by converting lung exhalation into a computer’s hashing rate. The velocity of human exhalation determines the hashing rate of a small micro computer that is mining on the XMR (monero) blockchain
“It is perhaps in the post-human space away from ‘the money’ that the blockchain and smart contracts have the most original things to offer.”
Artists and researchers explore, unpack and critque the blockchain
Trebor Scholz exposes the uncaring reality of contingent digital work, which is thriving at the expense of employment and worker rights. The book is meant to inspire readers to join the growing number of worker-owned“platform cooperatives,” rethink unions, and build a better future of work
The volume assembles the works of contemporary photographers for the purpose of lending visual evidence to the blatant discrepancy between people’s living conditions, which can be as fascinating as it is shocking
There are many reasons why i wanted to interview Mandiberg. He is an artist whose work i’ve admired for years, the co-founder of the brilliant Art+Feminism Wikipedia Editathon and a dedicated archivist of logos of failed U.S. banks
Creditworthy highlights the leading role that commercial surveillance has played—ahead of state surveillance systems—in monitoring the economic lives of Americans. Lauer charts how credit reporting grew from an industry that relied on personal knowledge of consumers to one that employs sophisticated algorithms to determine a person’s trustworthiness
The festival’s rallying cry was that time had come to discuss the economy without inviting the economists to the table. The videos of the keynotes are online and i’d like to highlight 2 of them: Frank Trentmann‘s chronicle of the consumerist society and Geerat Vermeij‘s theory about how a closer study of biological ecosystems can teach us more about the economy than we might suspect
The short films, animations and documentaries screened at the festival exposed the world of finance under the most human perspectives: from the bank robbery that goes terribly wrong to an economic system so complex they become incomprehensible for humans, from the bankers trying in vain to avoid massive troubles to people forming endless queues in order to receive free soup and bread, etc.
Why not start by treating economics like any other technology? Play with it, hack, use input from other disciplines, unleash science fiction on it, approach it in an artistic manner
Show Us The Money takes you on a journey to the world’s off-shore tax havens and corporate financial nerve centres. FOMU provides a glimpse of the structures that impact on all of us but which are themselves practically invisible. Three projects use very different artistic strategies to expose this global issue
The triptych All About You is a ready-made that brings up several social and subject/object relations, such as money circulation, artwork status, identification and citizenship. We could say it represents a “self-portrait as a citizen” with the Republic of Slovenia used as a mirror
A new variety of capitalism is currently taking form on the African continent. States are being remade under the pressures of rapid demographic growth, conflicts over boundaries, security demands, and the offerings of multi-lateral donors and data-processing corporations. Much of this turns to enhanced forms of state surveillance that is common to societies across the globe, but the economic and institutional forms on the African continent are unusual
Wealth Beyond Big Brother looks at what happens to trans-border exchanges when they take place inside highly unregulated states. More precisely within the confines of the disputed territories depicted in George Orwell’s book 1984
Members of RYBN were participating to refrag, a series of workshops, talks and performances that explored Glitch Art. Their presentation looked at what happens when HFT algorithms slip, glitch and disrupt the trading system. They analyzed four famous ‘flash crashes.’ Their study was based on a rigorous analysis of documents available online
Vincent Debanne sets the scene of contemporary naumachia in well-known playgrounds for luxury yachts: the bays of Antibes and of St-Tropez in France. Using image manipulation, the Battleship photo series provides a surprisingly realistic commentary on some of our world’s current economic, social and political issues
Collaborating with the Archive of Modern Conflict, Fiona Banner asked photoreporter Paolo Pellegrin to explore the City of London and to reflect its activities, behaviours, customs and costume through the lens of conflict photography
Jennifer Lyn Morone has turned herself into a corporation and collection of marketable goods and services. Everything she is biologically and intellectually, everything she does, learns and creates has the potential to be turned into profits. Jennifer Lyn Morone™ Inc is a graduation project in Design Interactions but as Jennifer underlines, this is not a speculative project
Virtually every stage in oil’s production process, from discovery to consumption, is greased by secret connections, corruption, and violence, even if little of that is visible to the public. The energy industry, to cite just one measure, violates the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act more often than any other economic sector, even weapons. This book sets out to tell the story of this largely hidden world
Pau Waelder has recently published $8,793 Worth of [Art], a collection of 159 real and false certificates of authenticity, culled from S[edition], an online platform that sells limited edition artworks in digital format. All Waelder had to do was a small ‘hack’
Designer Austin Houldsworth imagined a monetary system within the cultural context of Skinner’s utopian novel Walden Two. The payment system would challenge the established monetary function of ‘a store of value’, creating a new method of exchange that encourages people to actively destroy their money during a transaction
Historian Garrick Hileman, sociologist Nigel Dodd and financial activist Brett Scott reflected on the question “Is Bitcoin the new gold?” Shaking up online and offline worlds, the online currency Bitcoin has increased its ‘value’ at immense speed in the last year. Being immune from government interference and private manipulations, it has been celebrated as a new alternative currency by some and condemned as source of unpredictable risk by others
Nuría Güell has an impressive portfolio: she wrote a manual on How to Expropriate Money from the Banks, married a man from Cuba to give him her nationality, collaborated with a famous bank robber to design the plan to rob a bank agency from the high security prison where he was detained