White Papers on Dissent is a discursive programme dedicated to the investigation of blockchain as a tool for radical imagination. Though panel discussions, artist talks, participatory events, and a podcast it aims to collectively practice the making of the world otherwise, thinking through the technology to rehearse new social and political imaginaries.
White Papers on Dissent moves away from the economic discourse surrounding blockchain to understand the technology as a social apparatus. The programme examines how blockchain can articulate new ways of organising in a community circumventing hegemonic economic principles like the accumulation of capital and the focus on productivity. And, thus, reformulate the notion of value beyond the market. In this way, the project investigates how the particular characteristics of the technology can potentially re-address power structures and create alternative forms of governance adapted to the shared goals and wishes of a community. Therefore, the discursive project explores technology as a tool to concoct new elsewheres and otherwises: new forms of utopia with a biopolitical production adjusted to the characteristics and desires of the post-digital society.
White Papers on Dissent looks into blockchains through two complementary angles: the politics within the technology and its aesthetic experimentations. On the one hand, it delves into how the different uses of the technology develop of new political imaginaries, forms of subversion and new forms of digital activism. On the other hand, it explores how artists working with blockchains give rise to new forms of aesthetic resistance. they become rehearsals of the not-yet that formulate new meanings of social structures and prepare new spaces of autonomy.
The curator of White Papers on Dissent is Barbara Cueto. She is interested in the intersection of activism, new technologies and contemporary art. She is fascinated with how decentralised technologies are prompting new social constructions that compose new political and economic infrastructures, and how artists rehearse these imaginaries in their practices, giving us a glimpse in a world post-crisis.
She is the digital curator of C/O Berlin and a PhD candidate at the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam. She has convened and curated projects internationally at institutions like MMOMA Moscow for the 6th Moscow Biennale for Young Art in Russia, Asian Culture Centre in Gwangju and Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul in South Korea, La Casa Encendida in Madrid, Bétonsalon in Paris, Marres in Maastricht, Impakt Festival in Utrecht, and de Appel arts centre in Amsterdam, all in the Netherlands. And has been resident at Tokyo Wondersite in Japan, Rupert in Lithuania, and Cité des Arts in Paris.
www.cuetobarbara.com
