Unlocking Proprietorial Systems for Artistic Practice
Marc Garrett, PhD Fellow, Birkbeck, University of London
http://www.aprja.net/unlocking-proprietorial-systems-for-artistic-practice/
Posted in Journal Issues, Research Values
http://www.aprja.net/research-values/
Introduction
The cultural, political and economic systems in place do not work for most
people. They support a privileged, international class that grows richer while
imposing increasing uncertainty on others, producing endless wars, and
enhancing the conditions of inequality, austerity, debt, and climate change, to
own everything under the rule of neoliberalism. David Harvey argues that the
permeation of neoliberalism exists within every aspect of our lives, and it has
been masked by a repeated rhetoric around “individual freedom, liberty,
personal responsibility and the virtues of privatization, the free market and
free trade”. (Harvey 11) Thus; legitimizing the continuation of and repeating
of policies that consolidate capitalistic powers. Pierre Dardot and Christian
Laval in Manufacturing the Neoliberal Subject, say we have not yet emerged from
“the ‘iron cage’ of the capitalist economy […] everyone is enjoined to
construct their own individual little ‘iron cage’.” (Dardot and Laval 263)
If we are, as Dardot & Laval put it co-designing our own iron cages, how do we
find ways to be less dominated by these overpowering infrastructures and
systems? How do we build fresh, independent places, spaces and identities, in
relation to our P2P, artistic and cultural practices, individually and or
collectively – when, our narratives are dominated by elite groups typically
biased towards isolating and crushing alternatives? Does this mean that
critical thought, aligned with artistic and experimental cultural ventures,
along with creatively led technological practices, are all doomed to perpetuate
a state of submission within a proprietorial absolute?
To unpack the above questions we look at different types of proprietorial
systems, some locked and unlocked, and consider their influence on creative
forms of production across the fields of the traditional art world, and media
art culture. We look at how artists are dealing with these issues through their
artistic agency: individually, collaboratively, or as part of a group or
collective. This includes looking at the intentions behind the works: their
production and cultural and societal contexts, where different sets of values
and new possibilities are emerging, across the practice of art, academia, and
technology, and thus, the world.
The meanings of the words proprietorial and proprietary are closely linked.
Proprietary is defined as meaning that one possesses, owns, or holds the
exclusive right to something, specifically an object. For instance, it can be
described, as something owned by a specific company or individual. In the
computing world, proprietary is often used to describe software that is not
open source or freely licensed. Examples include operating systems, software
programs, and file formats.(“Proprietary Software”) Many involved in the Free
and Open Source Software movement, share a set of values built around its
beliefs against proprietary control over our use of technology. Olga Goriunova
argues that, software is not only bound to objects but also includes social
relations and it’s about breaking away from the fetishism of proprietary
software structures, and “commodification of social processes layered into
software production and operation.” (Goriunova 92)
If we consider the definition of proprietorial, in the Cambridge Dictionary it
is especially poignant when it says “like an owner: He put a proprietorial arm
around her.” This brings us directly to a biopolitical distinction. The term
biopolitics was first coined by Rudolf Kjellén, (who also coined the term
geopolitics) (Markus 35) and then; later expanded upon by Michel Foucault,
arguing that certain styles of government regulated their populations through
Biopower. Hardt and Negri developed Foucault’s ideas saying “Biopower is a form
of power that regulates life from its interior, following it, interpreting it,
absorbing it, and rearticulating it.” (Hardt and Negri 23-24) But, as we will
discover further into this text the term also reinforces a deep a psychological
bias that asserts the right of the patriarch to own our social contexts.
Locked and Unlocked Proprietorial Systems
A powerful image I will always remember from the 1980 Post-Punk movie Breaking
Glass. Is when Kate (Hazel O’Connor) the talented and angry, singer and
songwriter, gradually loses her agency. Whilst manipulated by the record
company managers, she is grabbed, and they hold her close to them. They’re not
necessarily aware of how suffocating they are, but there is an obvious
portrayal of ownership at play. It is through the social and managed
infrastructures, and the belief systems, in which we all grow up, that
proprietorial behaviours enact psychological and concrete forms of violence,
from birth to the grave. Slavery and domination by the patriarch are both
proprietorial systems. Murray Bookchin proposes that, even before social class
emerged that “the priesthood established quasi-political temple despotisms over
society, the patriarch embodied in a social form the very system of authority
that the State later embodied in political form.” (Bookchin 120)
If we want to find examples of what Bookchin refers to as despotisms over
society. We need not look that far. For instance, the pharmaceutical industry
has its own particular brand of ‘high’ priesthood, and proprietorial lock down;
in the form of Martin Shkreli, founder, and head of Turing Pharmaceuticals
where he raised the price for Daraprim in September from $13.50 per pill to
$750. The drug is preferably used for a parasitic condition known as
Toxoplasmosis, which can be deadly for unborn babies and patients with
compromised immune systems including those with HIV or cancer. His company,
Turing Pharmaceuticals AG, bought the drug, moved it into a more closed
distribution system than before, and instantly drove the price up. (Smythe,
Christie and Geiger, Keri) Soon after, he cut it down to $375 for some
hospitals after a mass public outcry. Even, though many pharmaceutical
companies held back at first and refrained from putting their own prices up, in
the end they all followed suit. Shkreli’s actions reflect a wider issue where
the priority is monetary and feeding the markets, and health and life is low
down on the list. The establishment of ever more efficient and productive
systems of growth are owned by fewer, more centralised agents.
“it’s the distribution of freedoms and access to sustenance, knowledge, tools,
diverse experiences and values, which improve the resilience social and
environmental ecologies.” (Garrett and Catlow 69-74)
Shkreli’s over the top approach is part of larger already accepted condition
where extreme scarcity threatens lives. In contrast, Dana Lewis has provided
the world with a fresh example to bypass the assumed narrative that only the
privileged can control our health and well-being. After being a member of the
diabetes community for years and frustrated with commercial companies’ closed
and expensive approach towards diabetes, she created the “Do-It-Yourself
Pancreas System” (DIYPS) and was founder of the open source, artificial
pancreas system movement (OpenAPS). (Lewis) Since then, a large online
community has developed using DIYPS, and advocating free and open software as
the way forward. Another way to deal with proprietorial domination in the
pharmaceutical industry, is to make an art project that delivers an element of
DIWO and DIY into its very being. One such project is Housewives Making Drugs,
2017, under the name of Mary Maggic. Based on the project by biohacker
biologist-artist, Ryan Hammond OPEN SOURCE ESTROGEN, “a collaborative
interdisciplinary project seeking to subvert dominant patriarchal institutions
of hormonal management.” (Maggic) Housewives Making Drugs is a fictional
cooking show where the trans-femme stars, Maria and Maria, teach the audience
at home how to cook their own hormones, step by step. They perform a simple
“urine-hormone extraction recipe.” (Maggic) While amusing the audience with
their witty back-and-forth banter about body and gender politics, institutional
access to hormones, and everything problematic with heteronormativity.” (Maggic)
Proprietorial domination is the presumption of ownership not only over our
psychic states of existence but also through the material objects we possess
and use daily, and this extends into and through our use of digital networks
every day. This can mutate into forms of dependency, reliance, and addiction.
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google etc. – have impoverished autonomous
relations to such a degree that it is becoming increasingly rare to experience
an exchange or online activity outside corporate-controlled “social” zones. The
digitized versions of ourselves graze away in these social networking platform
pens, like cows in a field, chomping at the bits allocated to us via biased
algorithms that dictate what we see and hear. Thus, our Internet experience is
restricted as we abide by and exist within imposed filter bubbles. When we use
these social media platforms and web browsers, our data is harvested and
scraped. In a recent interview on the subject of everyday addiction to digital
devices and social networking platforms, artist Katriona Beales says “Addictive
behaviour is both normalized and valorised in late capitalism as it is
associated with the public performance of productivity. Whilst these actions
appear to be the choice of individuals, how much is due to the influence of
mechanisms and systems of control?” (Beales)
This addiction is approached face on by the Tactical Technology Collective with
funding support from the Mozilla Foundation, in the form of The Data Detox Kit.
People are introduced to an 8-day step-by-step guide on how to reduce data
traces online. “Each day has a different focus – from cleaning up your apps, to
social media, to your phone’s connectivity – informing you of the data
processes, walking you through some changes you can make, and giving you a
small challenge at the end of each day.” (Tactical Technology Collective)
Beales’ critique on addictive digital behaviours, and the Tactical Technology
Collectives’ activities present a more recent, common distrust towards our use
of social media. The current conditions can give an impression that these
issues are only occurring now. But, if we look at forms of resistance going
back to The Diggers and The New Levellers, what is revealed is how deeply
entwined and established proprietorial domination is, in respect to land
ownership. In the British Isles, an enclosure was the act of “buying the ground
rights, and all common rights to accomplish exclusive rights of use, which
increased the value of the land. The other method was by passing laws causing
or forcing enclosure”, such as a parliamentary enclosure Act. Peter Linebaugh
describes the English enclosure movement of the 1500s, 1600s and up to 1850, as
belonging to a series of concrete universals, such as “the slave trade, the
witch burnings, the Irish famine, or the genocide of the Native Americans.”
(Linebaugh 142)
The similarities between land grabbing by past elites and how the Internet has
lost its potential for openness via top-down orientated, centralised platforms,
is a continuation of what is a timeless battle. In an interview with Ruth
Catlow on Furtherfield, Tim Waterman says, it’s the “exploitation of people and
resources that marks the practices of contemporary capitalism as very much a
continuation of the project of the enclosures, whether it is to skim value off
creative projects, to asset-strip the public sector which is increasingly
encroached upon by the private sector, or to exhaust land and oppress workers
in the Third World.” (Catlow and Waterman) Silvia Federici, says it’s no
accident that “the witch-hunt occurred simultaneously with the colonization and
extermination of the populations of the New World, the English enclosures, [or]
the beginning of the slave trade” (Federici 164) In her comprehensive study,
Caliban And The Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, Federici
writes that, the emergence of the witch-hunts were “one of the most important
events in the development of capitalist society and the formation of the modern
proletariat.” (165) And, it unleashed “a campaign of terror against women,
unmatched by any other persecution, weakened the resistance of the European
peasantry to the assault launched against it by the gentry and the state, at a
time when the peasant community was already disintegrating under the combined
impact of land privatization, increased taxation, and the extension of state
control over every aspect of social life.” (165)
Moving on from Divine Constructions
The mainstream art world of Frieze, the Saatchi’s, and repeated biennale’s
around the world, have for years, presented us with locked down proprietorial
systems. If, we consider how and why these art institutions such as the Tate
Gallery exist in the first place. A backdrop emerges, where a combination of:
conservatism, colonialism, imperialism (Harvey 11), colonization, conformity,
and the patriarch: have built walls around themselves, where those who do not
belong to the same class systems, rarely get through, unless they perpetuate
similar marketable values. The Tate Gallery’s legacy is intertwined with a
complex mix of ideals consisting of genius as a product, which assumes the
position of presenting what is deemed as the ‘best’ about the nation. This is
all bound in an almost untouchable divine construction, where the values of a
secular and enlightened culture co-exist as universal qualities. This imagined
civilization is a construct born out of a wide-ranging set of central, changing
values that include, colonial wealth, Christian liberalism, social science, and
ideals of the enlightenment, all sanctioned and driven from the historical
achievements and exploits of the industrial revolution. These attributes convey
nationalism, and a self-image with a cultivated sense of authority, where those
seen as the great and the good are given pride of place for all to admire.
(Garrett)
Gerald Raunig adds another level when he proposes it to be an inherent set of
the conditions imposed by state apparatuses instigated through conservative
values with a historiography, that promotes processes of marginalization. We’re
still dealing with the consequences of these reductive “conservatisms, such as
rigid canons, fixation on objects and absolute field demarcations, activist
practices are not even included in the narratives and archives of political
history and art theory, as long as they are not purged of their radical
aspects, appropriated and co-opted into the machines of the spectacle.” (Raunig
19) Anna Brzyski, argues that “the language of the canon obscures the historic
existence of multiple, temporally and geographically situated canonical
formations.” (Brzyski 7) Raunig and Brzyski both share the position saying that
these divides by the powers that be and established gatekeepers in the art
world, consciously create these divisions. This process is a systemic trickling
down, effectively maintaining the status quo with help by the artists
themselves. For instance, it is not unusual for artists who become successful
and those hoping to be successful, to edit out the lesser-known galleries,
groups and projects, who were inclusive and supported them earlier on in their
careers. I have looked at artist CVs as they have changed through the years and
it is noticeable that, smaller scale arts organisations gradually vanish, and
are replaced with better-known and established art institutions. This seemingly
banal act gives even more power to these well-established bodies and promotes a
myth that it is only they that supports artists. This blots out the reality of
the mix of diversity and grass root ecologies actually existing in the art
world. Alongside, exists a rather absolutist narrative that is promoting an art
mainly in relation to market driven incentives. There is massive social
inequality in the art world, which is accepted as the norm in art circles and
art magazines and galleries. They may well even acknowledge to themselves and
peers, that something is wrong with this, and it needs to change. But, as
Morgan Quaintance so succinctly puts it, “silence, resignation or apathy are
fuelled by something far more basic, comfort. Put simply, people are adverse to
personal risk and lifestyle change.” (Quaintance)
The recent appointment of Elisabeth Murdoch, daughter of Rupert Murdoch, to the
Arts Council England’s National Council, worryingly reinforces the neoliberal
agenda, as it is “directly linked to Sir Nicholas Serota’s current leadership
of Arts Council England and to his wife, Teresa Gleadowe’s own arts projects.
[…] During Serota’s reign at Tate, he supported artwashing in the form of BP
sponsorship, refused to recognise unions, privatised staff positions,
introduced the use of zero hour contracts, presided over a culture of
widespread bullying, privatised information, and, of course, Tate staff were
then asked to kindly chip-in for a new boat for his leaving present! Serota’s
leadership of Tate lasted 28 years.” (Pritchard) The Panic! Report, written by
academics Dr Orian Brook, Dr David O’Brien, and Dr Mark Taylor, draws on survey
data from 2015 and several academic papers into social mobility in the arts.
“The cultural and creative sector “significantly excludes” those from working
class backgrounds, which is in addition to barriers faced by women and people
who identify as disabled or Black and minority ethnic (BME), new research
finds.” (Romer) And, “the report also finds the creative industries are mostly
upper middle class and with very different cultural tastes from the rest of the
population.” (Romer)
To change the divide there needs to be infrastructural changes, such as what
punk and post-punk had in the 80s, when the working classes were part of the
cultural contexts. In media art, there are artists demonstrating through their
processes how this can occur, crossing over, between art and everyday life,
demonstrating critically engaging ideas that directly open up (literally) how
others can hack through and around, platforms, networks, and infrastructures,
in their work. For example, artist Jennifer Lyn Morone, turned the tables on
data scraping social networking companies, by becoming a public trading body
herself, claiming ownership of her data. Morone has claimed corporate ownership
of her personal data (self), and has founded herself, as her corporation and
intellectual property. Reclaiming agency whilst being immersed within data
driven networks, protocols, and algorithms, constitutes a style of Post-Fordist
cyborg-activism. Caronia proclaims that today’s cyborg is forced into a process
of capitalist growth, and sees no difference between work and leisure, “the
office and the playground, and between times of public and private life.”
(Caronia 27) Artist and hacktivist, Heath Bunting has demonstrated since 1996,
an insightful understanding in regard to biopolitical nuances involving data
and its uses and how it is used to measure our worth, status, and relevance in
wider society. One project of his, called The Status Project, is a functioning
database with over 10,000 entries by individuals mainly living in the UK. From
the data he has created over 50 maps with sub sections. One work to come out
this larger project is his identity generating software, which is, he says,
recognized under UK law as a person.
“The machine is defined in part by Bunting as the societal mechanisms that
attempt to understand and disrupt human social systems. This is most overtly
seen in corporate and government surveillance and mapping of individual
behaviors on the Internet, but also evidenced by any social contract whereby
privacy is traded for goods or services—driver’s license, credit card, store
membership.” (Klowdenmann)
Although there has been a gradual move to include artists practicing across
media arts, and through the intersections of art and technology. This shift is
a movement initiated from the ground up, finding small cracks in what is still
a closed set of systems that Felix Stalder proposes is, “created by the means
of active and unauthorized appropriation”. (Stalder 32) And, “opposes the
dominant version and the resulting speech is thus legitimized from another –
that is, from one’s own position.” (32) In her book Undermining: A Wild Ride
Through Land Use, Politics, and Art in the Changing West, Lucy Lippard says,
“Writing about conceptual, feminist, and political art as escape attempts, I’ve
concluded that the ultimate escape attempt would be to free ourselves from the
limitations of preconceived notions of art, and in doing so, help to save the
planet.” (Lippard 9)
Lippard’s comments are echoed by a younger generation of artists and techies,
either taking control of technology and or examining their roles in how to deal
with aspects of climate change, whilst also questioning those who build and
sell technology. This extends to artists claiming their own cultural identity
through their art, on their own cultural terms. This could be as geeky hackers,
contemporary indigenous artists, as well as, critically focused arts
organizations actively critiquing their own role in society. As a response to
underrepresentation of First Nations cultures in the Australian media landscape
and internationally, artists: Gretta Louw, Owen Mundy, and Sneakaway Studio,
have collaborated to build a photo editing app called Mirawarri celebrating
Indigenous Australian visual culture. It combines traditional Aboriginal Art
aesthetics with the vibrant, media-savvy approach of the Warlpiri artists of
the Tanami region, working with Warnayaka Art Centre. When, those living in the
western world suddenly stop appropriating everything they touch, this action
can allow a more nuanced acceptance of other existing ecologies beyond the
neurotic act of always wanting to control the context and situation.
What am I made of?
If, we remind ourselves of land ownership and the enclosures from 1500s – 1850,
and how now, people’s data is trawled and scraped, and then owned by
clandestine groups tracing every digital interaction. Both are non-consensus
directives impacting others without their own informed choice. The point here
is, it is a deliberate act of exclusion, and usually implemented before anyone
has a say on the matter. This panopticon (or netopticon) of networked dominance
has integrated humans into real-time, states of existences under constant
surveillance. A strategy inspired by the production and distribution of Free
and Open Source Software is that the opening up of these black box of objects;
is to share information, and to understand more what was previously hidden. As
we move into the age of the Internet of Things, it is expected that our homes
will be all linked up through smart devices and smartphones, in our homes,
ranging from: “temperature control, light automation, sprinkler scheduling,
smart refrigerators, home security”. (Chan) Although this may seem like a great
concept to some, Dyne.org are not so convinced, expressing serious concerns
around the vulnerability of home privacy and personal data. As an alternative,
they propose a project called “The Privacy Dowse”. Its aim is to perceive and
affect all devices in the local, networked sphere. As these ubiquitous devices
accelerate and communicate to each other even more, having control over these
multiple connections becomes even more essential. They say that more people
need to understand how to interact beyond GUI interfaces, so to see who has
access to private, common and public information. Dowse was conceived in 2014
as a proof of concept white paper by Denis Rojo aka Jaromil. The project abides
with the principles set out in the Critical Engineers Manifesto, conceived in
Berlin, in 2011, by The Critical Engineering Working Group, consisting of
Julian Oliver, Gordan Savičić, and Danja Vasiliev.
“The Critical Engineer observes the space between the production and
consumption of technology. Acting rapidly to changes in this space, the
Critical Engineer serves to expose moments of imbalance and deception.” (Oliver
et al)
Another project exploring infrastructural contexts beyond face value, is MOCC
(The Museum of Contemporary Commodities). As, part of The Human Face of
Cryptoeconomies exhibition at Furtherfield, on July 2015, they invited people
to “imagine the things they value today as the heritage of tomorrow”
(Furtherfield, The Human Face) to reflect on the ethics of production, data,
and trade embedded in the things they buy, by imagining themselves as future
attendees at a museum of 21st century commodities. They were invited to join a
team of volunteered researchers and art makers to get involved in a series of
walk shops, workshops, and digital art social events that ran at Furtherfield
Commons and Gallery, and local other spaces in and around Finsbury Park and
online. From a 9-month residency emerged the prototype, and re-purposed MoCC
Guide, Mikayla, an Internet connected ‘smart’ doll. It was designed to appeal
to young children with its long yellow hair, pink outfit and cheery voice, and
respond to children’s questions by consulting the web. Paula Crutchlow worked
with technologist Gareth Foote to reconfigure the doll’s original script to
make her self aware. They made the doll talk “about who made her, what she was
made from, and how she felt about the condition of almost ubiquitous digital
connectivity we increasingly live in. A year after the exhibition in December
2016, in Germany, a complaint “turned the media focus from lack of personal
security inherent in the object, to alleged breach of privacy by the object and
its software,” (Crutchlow) due to the doll constantly “listening, collecting
data without consent from children under 13, and accessing phone data, services
and hardware without clear explanation why.” (Crutchlow)
Unlocking Blockchain Expectations
When new and powerful technologies are developed they tend to reflect the
interests and values of those who develop them, whilst impacting many people’s
everyday lives. To counter this tendency, Furtherfield has sought to cultivate
a critically informed diversity in the conversations and practices surrounding
the blockchain development space, since 2015. The blockchain, the underpinning
protocol of Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies and smart contracts, is 10 years old and
is surrounded with a hype hardly seen since the arrival of the Web. Just as it
has been necessary for artists to move into all forms of technology to disrupt
the top-down narrative imposed, today’s thinkers, hackers, and artists need to
engage critically with the blockchain in order to translate, speculate and
intervene in the impacts of its global roll-out.
Through a film, exhibitions, commissions, and publications, artists and
researchers introduce circumspection, hazard warnings and a search for new
solidarities into the narrative of the blockchain, otherwise, characterized by
an accelerated logic of capital unleashed. The World Economic Forum predicts
that these developments will be accompanied by a significant increase in global
inequality. This vision of the future disenfranchises and demotes the role
played by an ever-increasing number of humans (and no doubt other life forms
too) in the business of determining what makes a good life. It has been shown
that ‘strategies for economic, technical and social innovation that fixate on
establishing ever more efficient and productive systems of control and growth,
deployed by fewer, more centralized agents [are] both unjust and
environmentally unsustainable.
Rachel O’Dwyer, a researcher into the environmental and artistic impacts of
blockchains points to the importance of an interdisciplinary engagement in the
evolution of new techno-social systems.
“We need to find ways to embrace not only technical solutions, but also people
who have experience in community organizing and methods that foster trust,
negotiate hierarchies, and embrace difference. Because there is no magic app
for platform cooperativism. And there never will be.” (O’Dwyer)
Some promising examples in this area include Resonate.is a blockchain based
stream to own music cooperative that allows creators, labels and music lovers
alike a share in the profits generated, as opposed to the current model, which
consolidates control in the hands of a very small number of corporations.
Tactical blockchain artwork Bail Bloc piggy-backs on the liberatory rhetoric
associated with decentralisation in the blockchain scene in order to amplify a
political message. Launched in 1999 the SETI project at the University of
California, Berkeley crowdsources computing power to analyze radio frequencies
emanating from space in the search for extraterrestrial life. (SETI) Bail Bloc
by Dark Inquiry takes the form of a downloadable cryptocurrency mining
application, that uses latent computing power to generate funding for bail.
They enlist “a critical mass of users to challenge the role that bail plays in
incarcerating low income black and brown people.” (Bail Bloc) Dark Inquiry
describe themselves as “an alliance of technologists, artists, writers, and
investigative journalists convened to deploy a series of situated,
confrontational, rhetorically-deliberate experiments that expose the anti-human
logic of dominant technological power, and demonstrate the possibilities beyond
it.” (Bail Bloc) Harvest by Julian Oliver, uses renewable energy to mine
cryptocurrency to fund climate change research, using a cryptocurrency called
Zcash, donating “the proceeds of his installation’s mining efforts to a group
of nonprofits focused on researching and raising awareness about climate
change.” He is now scaling up and designing “a small mining farm fed by a 10kW
turbine that will reliably earn between 12X and 30X more” than the initial
single-turbine installation. He estimated that this expanded setup could
sustainably fund a small NGO on its own. (Schneider)
On reading Blockchain Geometries, by Rob Myers written for Furtherfield, we
identify a challenge for those attempting to engage with ethical questions and
to compare the ethical standing of one blockchain against another. It becomes
necessary to engage closely with the technicity of the protocol. Here he
compares the Decred cryptocurrency with an unnamed alternative that we might
assume to be FairCoin.
“Deciding how to scale is a matter of governance. The Decred cryptocurrency has
put governance front and centre. As well as moving to a hybrid Proof of Work /
Proof of Stake system it has implemented an “on-chain-governance” system.
Decred contains the forum for its own critique and transformation, implemented
as an extension of the staking and voting system used by its Proof of Stake
system. On-chain governance is controversial but addresses calls to improve the
governance of cryptocurrency projects without falling prey to the off-chain
voluntarism that can result from a failure to understand how the technomic and
social forms of cryptocurrencies relate in finely-tuned balance.” (Myers)
Myers points to the dangers of coming quickly to judgements about the potential
social and political impacts of different projects without an understanding of
the nature of the technical systems at work. You can’t confront capitalism and
forces of neoliberalism without grappling with it. (Massumi) If we are to
survive and not fall into ill-informed states of perpetual denial, we need to
collectively build new ways of developing peer to peer knowledge and then areas
and interventions that occupy these territories for each of us and ourselves,
and not be left outside of these structures where we cannot change them.
Conclusion
This study proves the existence of a dynamic, thriving, grounded culture,
finding new and different ways of existing and creating, in contrast to the
dominant neoliberal narrative. Yet, the power to create our alternative
contexts is constantly under threat, by those who would lock down: territories,
systems, places, spaces, histories, and consciousness, for their own less
egalitarian interests. Humanity and arts across the board, needs new strategies
for social and material renewal to develop more diverse and lively ecologies of
ideas, occupations, and values.
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Part of Research values | VOLUME 7, ISSUE 1, 2018
There is value and there are values. There is the measure of wealth, metrified
and calculated in numerous ways, and there are ideas, ethics, preferences of
taste, and customs of ideology. […] But what really happens when the two are
conflated? How do we understand how the values associated with something give
it value; or, how giving something a value affords certain values? And, in what
ways are the conflations of value and values tied to the circulation of value
and values in contemporary technical infrastructures? […] The articles
published in A Peer-Reviewed Journal About Research Values interrogate value
and values in ways that respond to techno-cultural shifts and embrace the range
of economies that pervade digital culture. … read more
VOLUME 7, ISSUE 1, 2018
Edited by Christian Ulrik Andersen & Geoff Cox
ISSN 2245-7755
Posted in Journal Issues, Research Values
Marc Garrett
Co-Founder, Co-Director and main editor of Furtherfield.
Art, technology and social change, since 1996
http://www.furtherfield.org
Furtherfield Gallery & Commons in the park
Finsbury Park, London N4 2NQhttp://www.furtherfield.org/gallery
Currently writing a PhD at Birkbeck University, London
https://birkbeck.academia.edu/MarcGarrett
Just published: Artists Re:thinking the Blockchain
Eds, Ruth Catlow, Marc Garrett, Nathan Jones, & Sam Skinner
Liverpool Press - http://bit.ly/2x8XlMK
Latest post: Unlocking Proprietorial Art Systems interview:
with Artists, Gretta Louw, Antonio Roberts & Annie Abrahams
https://bit.ly/2HQM1bs
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