This panel focuses on how artist and designers are developing new forms of social organisations using blockchain, and how the technology can orientate their meaning with non-capitalist points of identification.
Participants: Erik Bordeleau, Maksym Rokmaniko, Gary Zhexi Zhang
This panel investigates new types of blockchain-based governance and how artists are using them to embody multi-dimensional values and motivations beyond market relations. These practices, as opposed to other blockchain artistic products like crypto assets, convey speculative moments of world-making. They empower multilocal and multidiciplinary communities and generate new systems of cooperation. As a result, these artistic practices become critical engagements with the post-digital society, and by performing the potential of blockchain, they come to be rehearsals of a potential new society to come.
Instead of exploring the grand narratives of economic systems and their political and social connotations, this panel proposes a careful meandering through the fringes of the economic discourses by looking into the work of artists and designers. The intention is to emphasise their relevance in the development of new uses and adaptations of blockchain governance, as their work is written in digital critical vernacular and fosters new imaginaries. They stimulate the development of new social relations, along with the elaboration of new worlds as alternative to hegemonic systems.
The different perspectives intend to elucidate how the technology can envision new socio-political structures and the role of artists conveying autonomous spaces for alternative futures. By thinking through the technology, they conceive new forms of governance that coordinate epistemic crowds, embedding values and social goals into the code, which, collaterally, produce an independent network of algorithmic resistance. As a result, this panel focuses on how artists activate blockchain as a hyper-political tool, utilising the adaptable digital structure to work within translocal communities united by shared values and political awareness.
