Episodes
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How can LARPing be a testbed for new political possibilities? Might DAOs serve as “underground prototypes” for fostering movements? Penny Rafferty explores these questions through her work as an artist, critic, and builder of collective worlds. Under the mantle of projects like Radical Friends, Omsk Social Club, and Black Swan, Penny’s work takes propositions that are brought up in the blockchain space and deploys them to other, broader ends, engaging with the structures of collective organizing and harnessing the intellectual spaces opened up by emerging technology to serve different contexts.
In this conversation, Penny talks about what DAOs are as well as what they could be. She also reflects on the moments of communal experience that have shaped her way of thinking, recalling time spent in the punk and hardcore music scenes and Black Bloc protests, alongside her experience banding together with other artists, writers and curators in rapidly-gentrifying Berlin to explore how institutions could better support artists earlier in their careers – and how, in each of these settings, tools from the emergent world of DAOs might help.
The discussion also turns to quadratic voting, the utility of roleplaying and paper prototyping for bringing complex concepts to a wider public, and the importance of tools that empower people access the collective decision-making skills that contemporary political systems often fail to cultivate. She and Simon talk emoji voting, decision-making frameworks beyond absolutism, and why AI will not spell the death of creative production – but it might mean we need new ways of funding it.
Seed Phrase is a project by Simon Denny for THE NEW INSTITUTE. This conversation was recorded in Berlin at Studio Jot, edited in Hamburg by fx:one, and made possible by Georg Diez, Lieke Fröberg, and Alice Gustson and The New Institute, with research and additional support by Adina Glickstein. The music for this podcast is by Amnesia Scanner, from their Web3 project SCAMMER, which was released as a series of NFTs.
Links:
Radical Friends book
Black Swan
A Speculative White Paper on the Aesthetics of a Black Swan World
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To Mitchell F. Chan, cryptocurrencies and artworks are both distillations of faith. Through exploring how art objects circulate and hold value, he’s revealed how crypto markets and art markets are “comically analogous”, even if they often refuse to see the ways in which they mirror one another.
The Toronto-based artist joins Simon to talk about the making of his Digital Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility, which tapped into the medium-specific potential of blockchains to connect NFTs back into the longer history of conceptual art in canny and perceptive ways. In this episode of Seed Phrase, Mitchell gives insight into Digital Zones – considered by some to have been an NFT before the time of NFTs – and reflect on the wisdom of figures from Yves Klein to Andrea Fraser, who laid bare the mechanics of building collective belief. Quipping that “a bitcoin is a receptacle of faith,” he challenges us to ask: could crypto’s lack of intrinsic value be its hidden superpower?
Also in this conversation: reflections from the early days of the CryptoPunks Discord, a deep-dive into generative art and its marketplaces, and an argument in favor of the fact that “art is a redundancy.” Together, Mitchell and Simon wonder: what will have staying power, outlasting crypto’s boom and bust cycles? Dwelling on the difficulty of predicting an artwork’s reception and value, they conclude that uncertainty is not a limitation, but rather, the space where innovation and beauty are produced.
Seed Phrase is a project by Simon Denny for THE NEW INSTITUTE. This conversation was recorded in Berlin at Studio Jot, edited in Hamburg by fx:one, and made possible by Georg Diez, Lieke Fröberg, and Alice Gustson and The New Institute, with research and additional support by Adina Glickstein. The music for this podcast is by Amnesia Scanner, from their Web3 project SCAMMER, which was released as a series of NFTs.
Links:
Digital Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility
LeWitt Generator Generator
Winslow Homer’s Croquet Challenge
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Do NFTs merely privatize ideas to generate profit? Or can they open up other pathways to political participation? Lee Tzu-Tung digs into these questions throughout her multifaceted practice – which spans visual art installations, workshops, and socially-engaged initiatives that creatively harness technology and artistic narrative-craft. Based between Chicago and Taipei, Tzu-Tung’s work grapples with Taiwan’s complex political landscape – with particular attention to women, queer communities, and indigenous movements.
From building a “bionic cryptocurrency” raising awareness of HIV to (speculatively) fractionalizing ownership of several milliliters of the South China Sea, Tzu-Tung has explored the manifold ways that artworks using blockchains and market design as a medium can be a lever for a plurality of political positions. “The most important thing about a technology is being accessible to different people with different abilities,” Tzu-Tung observes, expounding on the design challenges that still need to be overcome if blockchain can reach its fullest potential as a tool for decentralized organizing, especially at the global scale.
In this conversation, she also explains how her practice is one of “prolonged undercover performance art”, reflects on the limitations of NFTs as they currently stand, and discusses the origin of her interest in art that plays with markets – owing to the myth of a magical mountain in Taiwan where semiconductors are manufactured. If one thread can be said to unify Tzu-Tung’s wide-ranging practice, it’s an emphatic belief that the future is open-source.
Seed Phrase is a project by Simon Denny for THE NEW INSTITUTE. This conversation was recorded in Berlin at Studio Jot, edited in Hamburg by fx:one, and made possible by Georg Diez, Lieke Fröberg, and Alice Gustson and The New Institute, with research and additional support by Adina Glickstein. The music for this podcast is by Amnesia Scanner, from their Web3 project SCAMMER, which was released as a series of NFTs.
Links:
Artist website
Forkonomy
Positive Coin
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Terra0 launched with a proposition: To use blockchain to create a self-owning forest. More broadly, they wondered if this technology could be used to transform nonhuman entities into actors in an economic network. Since the publication of their whitepaper in 2016, the Berlin-based artist collective has tested these ideas by making works where capital is gained and administered in novel ways – like tokenizing flowers on a DIY marketplace and giving a crypto wallet to a bonsai tree.
Paul Kolling and Paul Seidler, two founding members of terrra0, join Simon to talk about a number of their art projects, which use blockchain’s transparent, distributed tools towards goals beyond simply moving capital. Across these works and across the conversation, they highlight the role of artistic narratives in supporting ambitious ideas – from enacting more “sane” ways of administering property to redefining personhood for our ecologically-entangled present.
They also get into the weeds about how to create a forest-cyborg with sensors and smart contracts, debate how to exhibit code-based art beyond throwing it on a screen at an art fair booth, and reach towards a more expansive definition of who (and what) “counts.” Each of these topics are underpinned by an impulse to critically re-evaluate the stories we’ve been told about nature’s separation from culture. Terra0’s motivation, it becomes clear, is nothing short of redefining identity. As they put it: “On the blockchain, no one knows you’re a tree.”
Seed Phrase is a project by Simon Denny for THE NEW INSTITUTE. This conversation was recorded in Berlin at Studio Jot, edited in Hamburg by fx:one, and made possible by Georg Diez, Lieke Fröberg, and Alice Gustson and The New Institute, with research and additional support by Adina Glickstein. The music for this podcast is by Amnesia Scanner, from their Web3 project SCAMMER, which was released as a series of NFTs.
Links:
Terra0's 2016 whitepaper
Flowertokens
Premna Daemon in “Proof of Work”
Seed Capital
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How could we bring decolonial methodologies to blockchain? What is a “community-activating art practice”? And how, as we navigate the ascent of new technologies – which frequently fail to deliver on their ambitious aims – might we begin to distinguish pessimism from grief? In an open and vulnerable dialogue, Simon Denny talks with Alice Yuan Zhang about her work, which “weaves the bitsphere with the biosphere”.
Alice in a media artist examining the relation between ecology and technology through feminist and decolonial lens – “exorcism” is her word of choice to describe leaving behind the dominant Western view on technology. In this conversation, she urges consideration of Web3’s origins and the baggage it comes with: “We have to reckon with the fact that this is not a clean slate,” she reminds us. “It is building on top of a history that comes with ideologies and narratives.”
Rather than identifying villains, Alice is concerned with the imaginaries that have led us all to accept to the environmental impact of technology – from the mining of rare materials to planned obsolescence and e-waste. In a similar vein, she and Simon discuss his project Mine, which takes on the dual meaning of “extraction” under surveillance capitalism, where companies prospect for data and rare earth minerals alike. They discuss who inspired them to make these artworks, and who they look to for guidance as they elaborate these lines of inquiry.
A cornerstone of Alice’s art is her interaction with the surrounding community: in her work, she creates continuous feedback loops between herself and others. Her project Remembering Our Roots, for instance, started with ancestorial work, tracing her own family’s history of migration; instead of grounding this investigation in a human perspective, she looked at the plants that grew and nourished her family at different places and times. With that, she went to others and exchanged seedlings for their stories.
Seed Phrase is a project by Simon Denny for THE NEW INSTITUTE. This conversation was recorded in Hamburg with a live audience and is made by Georg Diez, Lieke Fröberg, and fx:one audio productions. The music for this podcast is by Amnesia Scanner, from their Web3 project SCAMMER, which was released as a series of NFTs.
Links:
- Kate Crawfold and Vladan Joler’s Anatomy of an AI system
- Simon Denny's Mine (Installation, most recently at K21, and NFT Mine Offsets)
- Alice’s Remembering our Roots
- Alice’s Requiem for lost plants
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Bitcoin launched with lofty promises to improve the financial system in the name of the people. Fast-forward to today: most of its monetary value is concentrated among a small minority of token-holders. Has its initial dream been rendered impossible? Simon Denny talks to Toby Shorin about crypto’s actual potential to bring good to the masses.
Toby is a writer and technologist, and perhaps best known for cofounding the applied research organization Other Internet, which sets itself apart by researching crypto communities with ethnographical methods. He is also a cultural theorist interpreting the impact of media and technology on authenticity, community, and value. Through this lens, he and Simon discuss the role of participatory potential in shaping NFT projects’ success, as well as touching on topics like how crypto has changed art collecting.
Their conversation is bookended by the question of how blockchain technologies can contribute to the public good. Toby argues that, up to this point, crypto has only favored the few – yet an expanded notion of the public might be a fruitful angle for the critical rework it needs. Thinking concretely about the technology’s biggest potential, Toby sees opportunity in crypto philanthropy – or, in his words: “Maybe the YOLO-energy of crypto will make it FOMO into becoming good.”
Seed Phrase is a project by Simon Denny for THE NEW INSTITUTE. This conversation was recorded in Hamburg with a live audience and is made by Georg Diez, Lieke Fröberg, and fx:one audio productions. The music for this podcast is by Amnesia Scanner, from their Web3 project SCAMMER, which was released as a series of NFTs.
Links:
- Other Internet’s article Positive Sum Worlds: Remaking Public Goods
- Toby’s articles on aesthetics and authenticity
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Between false hopes and facile critique, there is an emancipatory view of emerging technologies like blockchain. Jaya Klara Brekke reclaims this space for building the world that she wants to see. Her critical engagement with blockchain coincided with its rise to mainstream prominence, and she has remained a vital voice of critique ever since. From her perspective as a researcher, strategist and artist, she talks about the token economy, the impact of crypto on the wider monetary system, and the frequent futility of "good intentions” in the face of powerful social forces.
Jaya’s research has focused on the political relevance of blockchain. Recently, she joined the team at Nym, where she is working to build new infrastructure for robust privacy protection. As one of the first scholars of political economy in this field, her research was a source of inspiration for Simon. “I knew a quick and dirty dismissal of the blockchain was possible”, she tells him in their conversation. “But I wanted to know: What else is there?”
Recently, Jaya made “Dashboards for Posthuman Life”, an art installation about how information is captured and instrumentalized – and what this means for us as users in the ongoing fight to establish data sovereignty. In relation to this work, which debuted at Forecast Forum in Berlin earlier this year, Simon discusses how he responds to ideological debates in his art; his projects such as Blockchain Future States and more recent updates like the Backdated NFT/Ethereum Stamp, for instance, addresses the potential implications of severing the monetary system from the state. Art, for both, makes it possible to stage questions around the human experience of living intertwined with technology.
Seed Phrase is a project by Simon Denny for THE NEW INSTITUTE. This conversation was recorded in Hamburg with a live audience and is made by Georg Diez, Lieke Fröberg, and fx:one audio productions with special thanks to Marieke Prilop and Tom Bodensteiner. The music for this podcast is by Amnesia Scanner, from their Web3 project SCAMMER, which was released as a series of NFTs.
Links:
- Jaya’s PhD thesis “Disassembling the trust machine”
- Jaya’s latest article: “The Market as a gun to your head, tool in your hand, or escape room from hell” (p. 33)
- Simon’s Backdated NFT/Ethereum Stamp
- Jaya’s Data Dashboard For Posthuman Life
- Nym
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Blockchain technology has held numerous promises: for a better internet, for decentralization, for a critique of power – and maybe even a critique of capitalism. Until, that is, capitalism struck back and turned this new tech into a symptom rather than a solution. But is there still the potential to change trajectory? Wassim Alsindi talks to Simon Denny about the function of ideology in Web3 communities, the origin of seed phrases, and the role of art in enabling positive change.
An astrophysicist by education, Wassim explains why he started working at the crossroad of science, Web3 initiatives, and art. He talks about his own cultural background, and why the ideal of a tool that takes financial power away from authoritarians appealed to him. Simon and Wassim also touch upon several of Wassim’s current projects – as founder and host of 0x Salon in Berlin, as a writer in journalism and academia, and as founding editor of MIT’s Cryptoeconomic Systems journal.
Wassim’s chosen seed phrase guides the conversation from the technical and historical basics (“What is a seed phrase?”) to the periphery (“How to design decolonial crypto practices?”). He and Simon relate their personal experiences from throughout the last decade and revisit some critical moments in the development of projects like Worldcoin and the concept of proof of work. With a sharp eye for crypto’s political and ideological underpinnings, Wassim explains how disagreements lead to schisms, or “forks” in the network, and what impacts, culturally and technologically, these fractures can have.
The changing narratives of opportunity and disappointment throughout crypto’s history of boom-and-bust cycles mirror the struggles for social change at large. Developments in Web3 could open doors to a new modus operandi, Wassim insists – as long as we engage critically and creatively.
Seed Phrase is a project by Simon Denny for THE NEW INSTITUTE. This conversation was recorded in Hamburg with a live audience and is made by Georg Diez, Lieke Fröberg, and fx:one audio productions with special thanks to Max Münz. The music for this podcast is by Amnesia Scanner, from their Web3 project SCAMMER, which was released as a series of NFTs.
Links:
- Wassim’s website
- 0xSalon
- Journal: Cryptoeconomic Systems
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How can we reclaim what was and is the promise of Web3 – a decentralized form of organization, granting autonomy to actors outside the control of established power structures? How can we look critically at Web2, characterized by platforms like Facebook and giants like Google, corporate and commodified, and attempt to build in new directions, using technologies like blockchain outside the logic of digital capitalism? How can we use cryptocurrencies to create different market structures and possibly even deliver on the (as-yet unfulfilled) ideals of Web1?
Seed Phrase is a series of conversations about Web3, hosted by the artist Simon Denny and presented by THE NEW INSTITUTE, where Simon is a fellow. In this prequel to the conversation series, Simon talks to Georg Diez, Editor-in-Chief at THE NEW INSTITUTE, about the utopian origins of Web3, which reach back to the beginning of the internet as we know it today, dating back to the 1960s. Could it be that the boom-and-bust cycle of potential and pitfalls, all too familiar today, began at the internet’s genesis?
In this conversation, Georg and Simon take a step back from current heated debates in the face of Bitcoin’s meltdown and ongoing concerns about the energy use of proof of work to ask: Is history repeating itself? With Web3, will we see counterculture and cyberculture merge once again, and then transfigure towards commodification and homogenization?
Debates around the future of emerging technology cannot be left to the profit-chasers and pessimists. As blockchain technology cements its place in the mainstream – and its human consequences come into view – critical enquiries like these are central to ensuring a more hopeful, open, and equal future.
