ARTeCHO Lecture: Ruth Catlow

  • Artworld DAOs for Care and Translocal Belonging | Radical Friends 

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    ARTeCHO Lecture: Ruth Catlow

    Artworld DAOs for Care and Translocal Belonging | Radical Friends


    Translocality changes the way we think about the places, people and cultures to which we belong as a result of globalisation, migration and hyperconnectivity. It specifically describes the fact that we all live in multiple layered and interconnected localities - both physical and online - all at once. And so the cultural political complexity associated with the question of where we come from is intensifying, along with questions about territory, who rules us, and by which systems of governance.

    Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) are blockchain-based organisations that in theory allow the 10% of the global human population who now hold crypto wallets to hold shared funds and resources, to circulate their own currencies and distribute them across national boundaries according to rules they make through a process of proposals and voting. But what are the hazards and potentials of DAO? What developments are possible and what care must we take in developing new systems of coordination and cooperation, especially in relation to place and locality?

    Radical Friends - Decentralised Autonomous Organisations and the Arts co-edited by Ruth Catlow and Penny Rafferty consolidates five years of research into a toolkit for fierce thinking, as well as for new forms of radical care and connectivity that move beyond the established systems of centralised control in the art industry and wider financial networks. It is the culmination of exhibitions, labs, think-tanks, prototyping and publications organised and produced through distributed friendship networks. This presentation will focus on two artworld projects that work critically with DAO technologies to increase access to tools and ideas and experiment with - governance, cooperation and coordination through place-based cultural commoning and distribution of resources and decision-making - Black Swan DAO and CultureStake.

    The presentation will be followed by a workshop on translocal belonging inspired by Taiye Selasi’s provocation - Don’t ask me where I am from, ask me where I am local.

    About the speaker
    Ruth is a recovering web utopian, an artist, researcher and curator of emancipatory network cultures, practices and poetics. She is Co-Director of Furtherfield for art, technology and eco-social change, and Co-PI at Serpentine Galleries Blockchain Lab. She specialises in critical group-driven discovery and playful co-creation that embraces more than human interests for fairer and more connected cultural ecologies and economies. Projects include: Larps for planetary-scale interspecies justice; the CultureStake app for collective cultural decision-making using QV on the blockchain; books such as Radical Friends - Decentralised Autonomous Organisations and the Arts (2022) and Artists Re:thinking the Blockchain (2017). https://furtherfield.org

    Tickets available on Eventbrite


    This lecture is part of the ARTeCHO project. A European initiative to unleash the potential of the emerging arts ecosystem, created by five European institutions: SERN – Startup Europe Regions Network; Zaragoza City of Knowledge Foundation/Etopia; Meet Digital Center; Baltan Laboratories; and Frankfurt School Blockchain Center (FSBC). ARTeCHO is co-funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union. Neither the European Union nor the granting can be held responsible for them.

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