With this article, I explore the connections between blockchain technology, coloniality, and decolonial practices. Drawing on Sylvia Wynter’s thought on the interdependent systems of colonialism, capitalism, and knowledge, as well as more recent work on the coloniality of digital technologies, I argue that blockchain-based systems reproduce certain dynamics at work in historical colonialism. Additionally, Wynter’s decolonial propositions provide a generative framework to understand countercultural practices with. Inspired by Wynter, Patricia de Vries explores the notion of “plot work as artistic praxis” to ask how artistic work, implicated as it is in capitalist logics, can create space for relating dierently in the context of the exploitations of those dominant logics. I apply this notion to examine how Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) in the countercultural blockchain space might contribute to this praxis.
MULTIFILE
Indigenous Papuans on the western half of the island of New Guinea, have experienced intersecting environmental, social, and political crises, within the context of a movement seeking self-determination. These ongoing crises are exacerbated by longstanding grievances over the Grasberg mine (which contains significant reserves of copper and gold), and environmental degradation caused by the mining and palm oil sectors, as well as the legacy of colonialism on the allocation of land and resources.
MULTIFILE
The following exchange, over email, between Dutch media theorist and Internet critic Geert Lovink and Aaron Moulton occurred on the occasion of the exhibition The Influencing Machine at Galeria Nicodim in Bucharest, which closed on April 20, 2019. The show, curated by Aaron Moulton, was an anthropological investigation into the macroview of the Soros Center for Contemporary Art (SCCA), an unprecedented network of art centers that existed across twenty Eastern European capitals throughout the 1990s. A survey of historical and contemporary artwork that explored ideas of influence, revolution, colonialism, and cultural exorcism, the Bucharest exhibition included a large archive covering the SCCA network that allowed first-time research into the institutionalized strategies of curatorial practice in the early years of the SCCA network, trajectories of influence that lead to specific kinds of cultural production.
MULTIFILE
