[NetBehaviour] TOKENOMICS Re: comments on blockchain, , art, etc., discussion with Ruth

[Andreas Dzialocha]

Hi Marc, hi everyone,

I just subscribed here :-)

> So, my other take is, are we by moving into the blockchain
> technology merely 'setting up/adding' more elitism on top of other
> froms of elitism, and deluding ourselves by thinking that we are
> opening things up for better?

Thank you for adressing all of this here.

I stumbled upon the DAOWO conference (im so happy that this exists! Will
be on the next events for sure) :-) - since then I am in the middle of
trying to figure out how blockchain data structures can play a role for
me (and us). And as everytime I find myself asking the question of
"where should we begin" with the realisation that the first question to
take is definitely not one about technology or blockchain, but rather
how we want to live and work as artists and humans together in a loving
and critical way - and how technology might help us in this or might be
better avoided.

> It is not only the physical, cultural, political, proprietorial and 
> technical, enclosures we need to change, but also enclosures of the 
> mind. Can the blockchain help us do that?

As I am writing this we are in the middle of planning the next
iteration of a festival I am working on with friends in Berlin (working
title "LIEBE 3000"). We decided to take a year for research to do this
project in 2019.

(I guess this is not the place to only talk about "our projects", but it
feels hard for me to separate this from all of these questions since I
am having a hard time thinking about technology without including real
cases of implementation.)

Since a few years we experiment with platforms to organize
artists, philosophers, composers and musicians in decentralized and
technologically-driven ways. All resources (like instruments, gear but
also skills) are shared, every possible gps position in the city can be
used as a place to create something, organize events or meet. In this
way a whole community builds and collaborates and experiments without
any curatorial instance - but through an open source software /
framework which we develop with the artists together (you can read / see
more about it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRYVH7fGa68 or here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ux2R9jwEIgw or here on the actual
platform: http://www.hoffnung3000.de). The projects usally are unfunded
or supported by some cultural state fund.

For us projects like our last festival HOFFNUNG 3000 became more than
just a fun way to organize a festival but also a very basic question of
finding alternative ways to live and work together. In some
conversations with participants we have right now, people point out that
HOFFNUNG 3000 meant a "hardcore collaboration" for them, I am still
thinking about that word.

A "hardcore collaboration" could be something where we have to step out
of certain known and repetitive modes, procedures of
building closed systems which confirm themselves and their rulesets. By
entering "unknown" territory through meeting "strangers" and working on
projects which are maybe more something like a collective meta (art)
product like the festival itself, we might find ourselves actually
learning something new and challenging us.

This year we experimented with anonymization of artists through animal
avatars, it caused a beautiful effect of people collaborating "randomly"
each other based on their needs, curiosity and interests rather than
age, gender and success.

I was recently talking with a friend. He mentioned this book by Donna
Haraway "Staying with the trouble". Here is a short description of her
book: "The Chthulucene, Haraway explains, requires sym-poiesis, or
making-with, rather than auto-poiesis, or self-making. Learning to stay
with the trouble of living and dying together on a damaged earth will
prove more conducive to the kind of thinking that would provide the
means to building more livable futures."

HOFFNUNG 3000 became a place for me where "everything" was important.
For example when the usual gender pattern occurred (guys taking the
stage), it wasn't a thing a meta problem because a curator decided upon
the programming, but it felt like everyone was responsible for this and
had to take a stand im some regard (I dont want to say that this is not
the case in more "traditional" festival settings, but still it feels
easier in these cases to blame the management than yourself).

For the next festival I like to think of a 1-2 month "camp", a building
which we rent in Berlin with x artists living inside. The building
should be placed in a vibrant part of town (as we also did this year),
all actions and events should be open for the public and take place all
over the city (and the world, last time we had activities from London,
Tokio or Sardinia). These points might be interesting:

* What kind of technological structure do we need to organize a group of
around 50 - 100 people over 1-2 months? Our solutions so far are already
very "effective" (https://github.com/adzialocha/hoffnung3000. Our
actions in last year were decentralized and self-organized but the
platform we built is rather central (which I also find interesting, it
plays a lot with the whole politics of platforms). How could we use a
much more "atomic" structure to use much more flexible systems of
organization. Could a blockchain structure play a role here?

* Would it make sense to have an independed network during this festival
which lives from its peers (An IPFS-like peer to peer system among the
participants and visitors)? Every instance on this network could also
function as contracting units, for example holding "contracts" in form
of resources one wants to give to the community or holding current
"usages" of these, or nodes could serve static content or serve their
computational power to run applications (like dapps in ethereum but
without all the money) for artistic applications or "collaborative
tools" (like a random meeting feature we had this year)

* We love hacking and we want systems to be hackable. There is only a
few good hackers around us, so still this whole philosophy of being open
might stop right there were things get to complicated. We would need
open and frequent workshops (also for the public) to get involved into
the code, "experts" could function as collaborators who implement ideas
by others when the borders seem to high (I am thinking about something
like Beuys "8000 Eichen" artwork in Kassel. "Computerverwaldung statt
Computerverwaltung" :-) a "ministry / office for hacking" should exist
in our little group, enabling people to work together on code - with or
without knowledge of it to hack the frameworks which act for us and with
us). I find it important to think about a structure which is possible to
manipulate on a very basic level

* All of these activities are based around friendship, openness and love
(all the things we should always think of first :-) ) the public we
involved this year the most were pedestrians. We had curious
people coming in and staying or yelling at us. Also the good beer drew
people inside into our nerd-hub, letting them stay to have hour-long
conversations

One participant of this year written this recently, which I find very
beautiful and inspiring:

"The future should be Agar Agar 3000 [this was an performance which
happend on this festival]. More campfires and boiling pots to sit
around, more undefined spaces, shared activities from which we can take
great risks. Definite experimentation with indefinite results. Activity
and reflection." (Read the whole thing on this wonderful platform:
http://rhizomatic-web-zine.herokuapp.com/#publication/5a020a4789dc210012a65f2e)

Sorry for bombing you with all of this, it is hard to be concrete
without writing to much about the actual contexts as you can imagine :-)
you can read how I am thinking out loud - and not all of is is thought
through, but I hope I find some resonance in this group here and maybe
this might lead to some great ideas :-)

Andreas

--
www.andreasdzialocha.com