Time: 10:00 - 17:00 o'clock
05 / 12 / 30 April
03 May
Universität / Haute École
for student applications
This seminar investigates the social role of new cryptocurrencies and critically looks into the emerging and existing infrastructures of post-monetary value production. Which are the social transformations based on new cryptocurrencies? Which are the frameworks and conditions under which cryptocurrencies challenge the conditions of art production, debt and capital’s exploitation of subjectivities? The formation of collective entities and ways of relating to each other?
This seminar will discuss post-monetary forms of value production from various artistic, anthropological and discursive perspectives. It will begin with discussing the problem of value in post-fordist labour and affective economies, and will then emphasize on emerging cryptocurrencies that are attached to community surplus, supposed to work independently from global financial players. Central to the operation of these processes are gift economies and anthropomorphic cell-to-cell contact. Hence, this seminar will discuss relevant perspectives of an Anthropology of Entanglement and critically examines emerging artificial, automated and quantum life forms.
In sum, central to this seminar is to dismantle the concept of crypto finance and to consider the manifold molecular, affective and relational processes that have always been forming the principles of non-monetary exchange.
These approaches will be discussed by closely looking into works and texts by Hito Steyerl, Ho Rui An, Bahar Noorizadeh, Pedro Moraes, Cecile B. Evans, Terra Zero, Jonas Lund, by Unai Alvarez-Rodriguez, Anna Tsing, among others, and inquieries on the politics of affection.
The seminar will be held in English and consists of theoretical and discursive parts.