REINVENTING THE ART LAB (ON THE BLOCKCHAIN)

Photographic documentation of:

DAOWO – Decentralized Autonomous Organization With Others

This series brings together artists, musicians, technologists, engineers, and theorists to join forces in the interrogation and production of new blockchain technologies. Our focus will be to understand how blockchains might be used to enable a critical, sustainable and empowered culture, that transcends the emerging hazards and limitations of pure market speculation of crypto-economics.

Intended as a temporary laboratory for the creation of a living laboratory, the inaugural workshop in the series takes a pragmatic approach towards building technical and economic capacity in the arts.

As the DAOWO series unfolds, each lab will work across a spectrum of themes and domains of expertise, breaking down silos and assumptions about what blockchain technologies might mean. The aim is to birth a new set of experimental initiatives which can reinvent the future of the arts as we know it.

This six-month programme has been developed with Ruth Catlow (Co-Founder and Artistic Director of Furtherfield) and Ben Vickers (Curator of Digital, Serpentine Galleries).

Workshop

Does Art need its own blockchain? Can blockchain technologies help create and retain value for artists and arts organisations? If blockchains are transforming all other industries and supply chains, how will it affect the arts? Is this technology at a stage now where we can begin applying it to our everyday processes and practices?

These are just a few of the questions we have been asking ourselves and others over the course of the last year. In the scheduling and convening of this workshop series, we invite others to join us as we delve deeper into the pragmatics of applying these questions to specific scenarios.

Designed as a temporary laboratory for the creation of a living laboratory, the inaugural workshop in the series will take a pragmatic approach in mapping out technical and economic capacity for the application of blockchain technologies within the arts.

This workshop will open with an overview of current developments for blockchain application within the arts ecosystem, outlining the key opportunities and challenges. Serving as the background, this will lead into a series of short presentations by practitioners who have invested their time over the past years unpicking the treacherous complexity of the blockchain. Each of these areas will then be built upon through facilitated working groups – with the explicit objective of enabling initiatives to move into a new phase of development.

As the workshop series unfolds, each lab will work across a spectrum of themes and domains of expertise, breaking down silos and assumptions about what blockchain technologies might mean. The aim is to birth a new set of experimental initiatives with each lab, which can contribute towards rethinking and reinventing the future of the arts as we currently know it.

More at http://www.daowo.org/