Blockchain: Utopia or U-turn?

An introduction on blockchain, money and hi-tech finance

18:00-18:30 | Voltnoi & Quetempo | An audiovisual history of money

A timeline of events, facts and speculations about the history of money remixed with pop culture.

18:30-19:00 | George Papageorgiou | Blockchain, down the rabbithole

Α basic intro to the principles of the technology, and a discussion on why it's important for mankind's future.

19:00-19:30 | Denis Jaromil Rojo | Bitcoin, the end of the Taboo on Money

Currency historically served at least two symbolic functions. First, it stood in for other forms of material exchange. Second, the very iconography of printed currency served as part of a system of liturgy designed to “glorify” power. The rise of the credit industry, and elaborate financial engineering, has rendered both of these aspects of currency less visible. Consumers don’t look at as much currency as they used to. The images and symbols are gone, as if taboo. Bitcoin opens up a chance to examine that move, to critique both the original symbolic functions of currency and the recent subsuming of symbol by credit and computationally-based forms of exchange.

19:45-20:30 | Benjamin H. Bratton | Dumb Rocks and Smart Batteries: Change, The Exchange Value of Matter, and The Material Valuation of Exchange

Blockchain technologies have become the prism through which many ideas about trust and social relationships are technologically negotiated in recent years. In this lecture, sociologist and design theorist Benjamin Bratton explores both the potentials and pitfalls of this technical architecture and its projected hopes and dreams, which distort the way we understand its potentialities.

Blockchain as a form of governance, law and social empowerment

18:00-18:30 | Dimitris Vourakis | Code=Law?

A ‘binary’ vision of law and governance: from paper contracts and humans to ‘smart’ (data-driven, self-executing) contracts, artificial actors, ‘decentralised autonomous organisations’ and the quest to replace law with code.

18:30-19:00 | Marco Sachy | How blockchain technology can foster social innovation

19:00-19:30 | Brett Scott | Visions of a Techno-Leviathan: The Battle of Blockchain Ideologies

17:30-21:00 | Open workshop with OMSK social club

Already mined your Cryptorave ticket? Unlock further immersive tactics for Role Game Play and meet your local community. Omsk Social Club will lead you through identity building routines, bleed strategies, crypto-world constructions and emotive political routes.

Free admission | Reservation at infotickets@sgt.gr is required (providing name, surname and mobile phone number)

Blockchain applications and speculations in the arts

18:00-18:30 | Matthew Liston | Faith machines: amplified reflexivity between value and belief

Matt Liston is starting his own religion — and he’s putting it on the blockchain. Liston, who left his position as CEO of the blockchain project Augur amid a cloud of controversy, has spent the afternoon in Bodega Bay developing what he describes as "mechanisms for worship" for his new religious order, called 0xΩ (Liston pronounces this as "Zero Ex Omega"). The religion will present both a blockchain system for pre-established religions, and a new faith-based order of its own.

18:30-19:00 | Ruth Catlow (Furtherfield) | Artists Re:Thinking the blockchain

The blockchain is widely heralded as the new internet—another dimension in an ever faster, ever more powerful interlocking of ideas, actions, and values. This landmark publication by the art and social change organization Furtherfield brings together a diverse array of artists and researchers engaged with blockchain technology, unpacking, critiquing, and marking its arrival in the cultural landscape.

19:00-19:30 | Kei Kreutler | Autonomous ecologies at a distance

In the blockchain industry, the debate surrounding decentralized governance assumes governance is the main arena for enacting change, but whether it’s the self-owning forest of terra0 or “Nature 2.0,” the exponentiating legibility of inhuman and ecological actors’ agency to capital will increasingly transform our understanding of what governance decisions have always been made outside of our process-based control. This talk will examine the entanglement of ecologies and protocols in artistic and governance practices for a new, animated conservationism.

19:30-20:00 | Mat Dryhurst | Own or be Owned: A stake in the heart of undead music

Mat Dryhurst argues that many discussions around the potential implications of blockchain technology in the realm of music and the arts are limited in imagination, simply proposing ways to add efficiency to fundamentally flawed industries and value propositions; new blood for undead ideas. Alternately, decentralised economic ideas such as DAO’s, Data Guilds and Tokenised Group Equity models have the potential to create a cultural hard fork, and stimulate new methods of collective ownership and governance worth getting excited about.

23:00-6:00 | Cryptorave party | by !Mediengruppe Bitnik + Omsk Social Club

with: Arpanet, Amnesia Scanner, Bill Kouligas, M.E.S.H., Voltnoi
The Cryptorave is a utopian gesture to adopt and experiment with blockchain technology, cryptocurrencies and DAO to support and power a subculture. Cryptoraves open a thinking space in which subcultural networks can examine blockchain technology as a means to structure and put value into networks. This is achieved both through actual mining of cryptocurrency by participants and through a layer of Live Action Role Play (LARP)/ Real Game Play (RGP). To attend a Cryptorave you need to mine the cryptocurrency Monero (XMR) to receive your entry pass. By joining their computing power together, the community collectively generates value to fund the Cryptorave machine and enable the autonomous dance party experience. The collectively generated value aims to ensure the basic existence of the network and to provide an amount of security and privacy.

There will also be a special presentation of a project led by Berlin-based duo Amnesia Scanner. AS WiFi expands on the Amnesia Scanner show experience by connecting users with Oracle, the AI element of the band, and letting them aquire cryptotokens that can be used to purchase exclusive music. It’s a project that tackles the future of music by using decentralized platforms on the internet.

A critique on blockchain technologies

19:00-19:30 | Jaya Klara Brekke | Authority, autonomy and trust - a political history of blockchain

Blockchain technology comes from an explicitly anti-authoritarian technological history: decentralized peer-to-peer networks were developed as a way to circumvent authorities in the face of shut-down, censorship and control. But in the years since Bitcoin, blockchain projects tend to attempt reproduce the very techniques and actions of authorities, albeit in a decentralised manner, and in ways that actively seek to be beyond control. In this talk, Jaya Klara Brekke will trace through how the project of decentralized network technologies shifted from a political economy of flows, open access and self-determination, to fine-grained enforcement of access control, property rights and systems beyond control through new forms of algorithmic authority, and answer the question Why.

19:30-20:00 | David Gerard | Critique on Blockchain
In conversation with journalist Yiannis Orestis Papadimitriou.

David Gerard covers the origins and history of Bitcoin to the present day, the other cryptocurrencies it spawned including Ethereum, the ICO craze and the 2017 crypto bubble, and the attempts to apply blockchains and smart contracts to business.

20:00-20:30 | Jemima Kelly | Banking on the blockchain is a bad idea

Jemima will argue that banks, despite having spent millions of dollars on blockchain over the past four years, have so far not found a reason to use the technology. She will argue that this isn't just a case of giving blockchain time. Rather, it is because there is nothing that blockchain can do that existing technology and other financial infrastructure can't achieve. She will also argue that the only viable use-case for blockchain technology is in fact bitcoin, which itself is very problematic (but mainly not because of the blockchain). And that outside of the world of cryptocurrencies, the idea of the blockchain starts to lose its meaning.

20:30-21:00 | James Bridle | New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future

As the world around us increases in technological complexity, our understanding of it diminishes. Underlying this trend is a single idea: the belief that our existence is understandable through computation, and more data is enough to help us build a better world. In this video, shot especially for the event, leading artist and writer James Bridle surveys the history of art, technology, and information systems, and reveals the dark clouds that gather over our dreams of the digital sublime.

Arpanet [USA] is one of the pseudonyms of Gerald Donald. It was named after both ARPANET (one of the precursors to the internet) and ARP Instruments, an early synthesizer company. Gerald Donald is a Detroit techno producer and artist. With James Stinson he formed the afrofuturist techno duo Drexciya, and he is the main member of Dopplereffekt.
www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Donald
Click here and here to watch videos

Benjamin H. Bratton [US] is an American sociologist, architectural and design theorist, known for a mix of philosophical and aesthetic research, organizational planning and strategy, and for his writing on the cultural implications of computing and globalization. He is currently Professor of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego and Director of The Center for Design and Geopolitics think-tank at Calit2, The California Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technology. Among his most recent work are the books The new normal (Strelka Press), The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty(MIT press), Dispute Plan to Prevent Future Luxury Constitution(Sternberg Press, 2015).
http://www.bratton.info

Voltnoi Brege [GR] is a multimedia artist, founding member of the audiovisual groups drog_A_tek and The Erasers, the cultural centre BIOS and the DETACH art collective. Currently he works as an independent curator.
www.drogatek.com, www.soundcloud.com/voltnoi-brege

Jaya Klara Brekke [SE] writes, does research and speaks on the political economy of blockchain and consensus protocols, focusing on questions of politics and power in distributed systems. She is the author of the B9Lab ethical training module for blockchain developers, and has been working as a researcher, designer and curator on projects related to the political economies of infrastructures for the past ten years. She is based between Durham University, UK, where she is writing a PhD titled 'Distributing Chains, Three Strategies for Thinking Blockchain Politically', London where she spends much of her time with the InfoSec research group at UCL Computer sciences department and Vienna as collaborator of RIAT, Institute for Future Crypto-economics. www.jayapapaya.net

James Bridle [UK] is an artist and writer working across technologies and disciplines. His artworks have been commissioned by galleries and institutions and exhibited worldwide and on the internet. His writing on literature, culture and networks has appeared in magazines and newspapers including Wired, Domus, Cabinet, The Atlantic, The New Statesman, The Guardian, The Observer and many others, in print and online. He lectures regularly at conferences, universities, and other events. New Dark Age, his book about technology, knowledge, and the end of the future, was published by Verso (UK & US) in 2018. His work can be found at http://jamesbridle.com.

!Mediengruppe Bitnik are contemporary artists working on, and with, the Internet. Their practice expands from the digital to physical spaces, often intentionally applying loss of control to challenge established structures and mechanisms. In the past they have been known to subvert surveillance cameras, bug an opera house to broadcast its performances outside, send a parcel containing a camera to Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy in London and physically glitch a building. In 2014, they sent a bot called «Random Darknet Shopper» on a three-month shopping spree in the Darknets where it randomly bought items like keys, cigarettes, trainers and Ecstasy and had them sent directly to the gallery space. https://wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.bitnik.org/

Ruth Catlow [UK] is since 1997 co-founder and artistic director of Furtherfield. Founded in 1997 by artists Marc Garrett and Ruth Catlow, Furtherfield is the UK’s leading organisation for art, labs, & debates around critical questions in art, technology and social change. Its thriving international, online community and programmes make network cultures more feelable and accessible to more diverse people. Exhibitions and labs tour nationally and internationally, strengthening the expressive and emancipatory potential of digital technology. Furtherfield is a non profit organisation and has been part of the Arts Council England National Portfolio of Organisation since 2005. www.furtherfield.org

Omsk Social Club is a “futuristically political”, [i.e. unrealistic] immersive action group. Omsk proposes contents and makings as a form of post-political entertainment in an attempt to shadow-play politics until the game ruptures the surface we now know as Life. In the field this is called “Bleed”. Omsk uses traditional methods of Live Action Role Play (Larp) and Real Game Play (rgp) to induce states that could potentially be fiction or a yet unlived reality for the players. Omsk works closely with networks of players, everything is unique and unrehearsed. Omsk’ s game designs examine virtual egos and popular experiences allowing the works to become a dematerialized hybrids of modern day culture alongside unique personal experiences. In the past Omsk has designed games that have introduced landscapes and topics such as rave culture, survivalism, future societies, catfishing, desire & sacrifice, positive trolling, algorithmic strategies and decentralised crypto-strategies.
http://punkisdada.com/

DETACH is the curatorial duo of Voltnoi & Quetempo focusing on pop culture, politics, music and the internet. They have curated Enter Afrofuturism, The Death of Recorded Music, Blockchain: Utopia or U–turn? and they have written and directed the lecture performance The Dark Manifesto that premiered at the Greek Festival in 2016.

Mat Dryhurst [UK] releases music, research and artworks solo and in conjunction with creative partner Holly Herndon. He teaches at NYU’s Clive Davis Institute of Music.
www.mathewdryhurst.com

Dyne.org is a non-profit free software foundry with more than 15 years of expertise in developing tools and narratives for community empowerment. Code is our literature: we build media architectures to communicate, interact and inspire each other. Our research is engaged and our code is open source.
www.dyne.org

David Gerard [AU] writes the cryptocurrency and blockchain news site Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain, and is the author of the 2017 book Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum & Smart Contracts. As well as being a crypto journalist, he also works as a Unix system administrator, where his job includes keeping track of exciting new technologies, and advising against the bad ones. He has also been an award-winning music journalist, and has blogged about music at Rocknerd.co.uk since 2001. He is a volunteer spokesman for Wikipedia, and is on the board of the RationalMedia Foundation, host of skeptical wiki RationalWiki.org, www.twitter.com/davidgerard

Jemima Kelly [UK] joined Financial Times Alphaville in April 2018. Before that she wrote about the foreign exchange market, cryptocurrencies, and fintech at Reuters. She also had stints there writing about the asset management industry and pensions. She covered the BP oil spill from Louisiana, and the Brexit reverberations from a muddy field in Glastonbury. She got her start by sneaking into The Economist as a “corrector”, then moonlighting as a reporter, travelling to Myanmar to write about its literal and political landmines. She once perused every issue of The Sun between 1979 and 1990 for her history dissertation, “What a pair! Page Three and the Thatcher Years”. Before university she pursued a career in music. She still sings and writes songs. Jemima is interested in cryptoeconomics (sorry), technology, philanthropy, the ideas industry and pseudo-religions, index investing, and the media. Do contact her with any ideas. www.twitter.com/@jemimajoanna

Kei Kreutler [US] is a researcher and writer interested in how cultural narratives of technologies shape their use. As Director of Strategy at Gnosis, she oversees messaging and direction as the company builds open protocols for new market mechanisms, and she curates events at Full Node, Europe’s largest co-working space for blockchain and web 3.0 initiatives. Her project-based practice spans disciplines and has been exhibited by organizations including the Victoria & Albert Museum and FACT Liverpool. Her work focuses on organizational design and utopian conspiracies.www.kei.bio

Bill Kouligas [GR] is a Berlin based artist, musician and founder of the label Pan. Berlin-based PAN has been excavating experimental electronic attitudes since 2008. Label helmsman Bill Kouligas grew up in Athens on a steady dose of hardcore, post-punk and new wave, and had already got his hands deep in the European noise scene before arriving in Berlin. He initially started PAN to document the music of his friends, while also setting up a platform to explore his graphic interests, and the cross-section of ideas that lie in-between.
www.p-a-n.org, https://www.nts.live/shows/pan/episodes/pan-3rd-december-2018

Matthew Liston [US] is a crypto native based in San Francisco. He bears a slight responsibility for accelerating hypercapitalism through architecture and promotion of decentralized prediction market platforms (self-sovereign markets for everything). He is trying to repent by catalyzing the emergence of decentralized belief systems with internal cryptoeconomies to incentivize community coordination through the 0xΩ project. Cryptoraves are his place of worship. www.blog.gnosis.pm

As a co-resident of Berlin club night Janus, M.E.S.H. [UK] has been constantly active bringing fragmented rhythms to the dancefloor on PAN EPs such as Scythians and Damaged Merc, and building oblique, theatrical sound-stages on longer works such as Piteous Gate. Violent cinematic effects enshroud ornate, virtual-acoustic instrumentation, with an eerie calm ebbing beneath the flux. On new album Hesaitix the atmosphere has shifted; the radical deconstruction of previous releases has given way to subtler interventions, building new structures in the territories where the unconscious and the alien intersect. Click here to watch a video. www.soundcloud.com/m-e-s-h

Makis Kentepozidis [GR], known as Quetempo, is a member of drog_A_tek and DETACH working on sound/text/desire of everyday life critique. www.drogatek.com

George Papageorgiou [GR] was part of the founding team that built and taught the first university course on Blockchain globally, at the university of Nicosia. He has consulted several major corporations and governments on ways to benefit responsibly and sustainably from blockchain technology. In the past, he's worked in Intellectual Property and Technology management and is a retired officer of the Hellenic Air Force, with many years of experience in military jet aircraft engineering. George holds an MBA from Greenwich University and currently manages cutting edge, High-Performance-Computing data centres in the Nordics. www.digitalcurrency.unic.ac.cy

Denis Jaromil Rojo [IT] (also known as the Rasta Coder) is a free software programmer, a media artist and activist. He has made significant contributions to the development of multimedia and streaming applications on the Linux platform. He was born in Pescara, Italy, but now lives in Amsterdam, Netherlands. He is author of the dyne: bolic Linux distribution, and of various free software projects, including MuSE and FreeJ. His artistic creations are related to the context of netart and software art; the code :(){ :|:& };: has been said to be 'the most elegant fork bomb code ever written'. In 2000 Jaromil started dyne.org under the flag of Freedom of Creation, playing hybrid between the fields of politics, art and technology. www.dyne.org

Since 2010, Marco Sachy [IT] has been a cryptocurrency and distributed ledger designer, now leveraging a PhD in monetary theory and policy applied to the crypto industry, decentralised banking engineering and social-purpose complementary currency systems. Dr. Sachy is a renown public speaker in various contexts - academic, business, social activist, cultural and policymaking, for instance at the United Nations Institute for Social Development. He is also an European Commission validated Blockchain Independent Expert in different qualities: from research consultant and panelist to project proposals evaluator. Marco Sachy holds a BA in Philosophy of Language (Milan), an MA in Philosophy and Economics (Rotterdam) and a PhD awarded by University of Leicester School of Business. His research is titled "Money for the Commonwealth of the Multitude - toward a user - managed currency and payment system design". www.dyne.org

Amnesia Scanner [FI] is a Berlin-based, Finnish electronic music duo currently signed to PAN. Their debut physical EP AS was released as a vinyl exclusive in 2016. They have also collaborated with Holly Herndon and Mykki Blanco.
Founded in 2014, Amnesia Scanner’ s approach is informed by a unique perspective on technology and the way it mediates contemporary experience. System vulnerabilities, information overload and sensory excess inform their work, which has found a home in both clubs and galleries.Building on their mixtape AS Live [][][][][] (2014), Amnesia Scanner’s critically acclaimed audio play Angels Rig Hook (2015) laced a potpourri of dancefloor tactics with a machinic narrator. Their dual EPs for Young Turks, AS and AS Truth (2016), distilled this immersive environment into an abrasive collection of cryptorave tools. The most striking detail of Another Life is Amnesia Scanner’s use of both human and inhuman voices. The latter is provided by the latest addition to the production unit, a disembodied voice called Oracle, which represents the sentience that has emerged from Amnesia Scanner.Amnesia Scanner has presented work at art institutions such as ICA London, HKW Berlin, and the Serpentine Gallery Marathon in London. They collaborate with PWR Studio for their design and visual direction. The AS live experience is co-created with Stockholm-based Canadian designer Vincent De Belleval. When unplugged from the Amnesia Scanner stream, Haimala works as a composer and producer with a wide range of musical and visual artists, and Kalliala co-directs the think tank Nemesis.
“Amnesia Scanner are meanwhile likely to be one of the cornerstone acts in 2016’s electronic underground.” The Guardian
“If we can begin to imagine what a cyborg’s chaotic inner id might be like, you have to to listen to AS. [...] Music this uncomfortable is rarely so euphoric.” 8.2 / 10 – Pitchfork
“Labeling Amnesia Scanner as a “whole new breed of music” is one of the biggest under-sells EVER. I’m fairly certain Amnesia Scanner isn’t even human(s), but WiFi warfare that musters on the low from signal to ping” Tiny Mixtapes
“Amnesia Scanner take modern club music’s obsession with chrome textures, hi-def samples and found sound to absurd levels.” 4.2 / 5 – Resident Advisor
www.amnesiascanner.net
Click here and here to watch videos

Brett Scott is a journalist, campaigner, former derivatives broker, and the author of The Heretic's Guide to Global Finance: Hacking the Future of Money (Pluto, 2013), in which he covers the inner workings of financial institutions, including the cultural dimensions of the financial system. He works on finance reform, alternative finance, and economic activism with a wide variety of NGOs, artists, students, and startups, and writes for publications such as The Guardian, New Scientist, Wired Magazine, and CNN.com. He produced the 2016 UNRISD report on blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies and is a senior fellow of the Finance Innovation Lab, an associate at the Institute of Social Banking, and an advisory group member of the Brixton Pound. He helps facilitate a course on power and design at the University of the Arts London and hosts workshops on alternative finance with The London School of Financial Arts.

Dimitris Vourakis [GR] is managing director of Curiositas, an innovation firm. Our team of technologists, lawyers and financial analysts research and develop emerging technologies that shape finance, law and the digital economy. We are advocates for an open internet, data privacy, cyberculture and decentralisation. Get in touch if you wish to discuss our portfolio of experiments or explore your own projects; we are available to share resources, invest or enter into joint ventures in pursuit of exciting ideas. Or get in touch if you just want to waste time creating debt instruments with your “crypto-kitties” as collateral. We do that too. https://curiositas.io/