Link to the Zoom meeting room: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82776323937?pwd=RTI1U25hU2NLWG1aalM4RE95T1BFZz09

FOUNDATIONS: TOKEN

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 17, 12-2PM EST (NY time)

SPEAKERS: JILLIAN CRANDALL, INTE GLOERICH, XAVIER BALAGUER RASILLO

Image Credit: Jillian Crandall

In the TOKEN session, speakers will present a range of work on the ideological foundations, theoretical suppositions, and empirical observations of cryptocurrency, blockchains, NFTs, and distributed ledger technologies on space, design, and culture. Inte Gloerich will discuss blockchain imaginaries as an emerging cultural force, deconstructing its rhetoric of mystical fascination, and exploring its power as a tool in speculative design and utopian visioning connected to theoretical underpinnings ranging from posthumanism to quantum entanglement. Jillian Crandall will raise the question - who has the power to dream - when discussing the empirical realities of crypto-utopia in Puerto Rico, where crypto-colonialism is driving an economic re-visioning of the territory, contested by feminist and grassroots groups with alternate techno-economic visions. Xavier Balaguer Rasillo further explores how grassroots organizations can harness the power of the digital to construct alternate economic post-capitalist futures in his critical look at the case of FairCoin in Catalonia, highlighting the challenges and pitfalls of crypto and the so-called “potential” of blockchain. Together the panel will question how crypto and blockchains convene publics in virtual and physical space; how distributed technologies materialize geographically with significant environmental, urban, and social impacts; and how tokens and blockchains are not just a utility or service, but also a theoretical tool that reframes how we think about value, chipping away at cracks in existing structural foundations and potentially reconstructing the foundations for more equitable design futures.

Jillian Crandall

Jillian Crandall is a registered architect, urbanist, and researcher investigating the effects of digital technologies on infrastructure, space, and lives. Her recent work published in Design and Culture and Political Geography focuses on the urban impacts of blockchain, crypto-colonialism, and digital inequality. Jillian is an advocate for digital equity, spatial justice, and design justice, which are the aims of her critical urban research and design practice, CONTRA+. She teaches at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute School of Architecture in Troy, NY.

Inte Gloerich

Inte Gloerich is a researcher working on the politics, artistic imagination, and (counter)cultures surrounding digital technology and economy. Since 2015, her work at the Institute of Network Cultures predominantly focuses on the affordances and cultures associated with blockchain and other financial technologies. In 2020, this topic became the focus of her PhD project at Utrecht University. Previously, she co-edited MoneyLab Reader 2: Overcoming the Hype (with Geert Lovink and Patricia de Vries) and State Machines: Reflections and Actions at the Edge of Digital Citizenship (with Yiannis Colakides and Marc Garrett). Inte teaches at the MA New Media & Digital Culture and the BA Media & Information at the University of Amsterdam.

Xavier Balaguer Rasillo

Xavier B. Rasillo is a researcher working in the University of Zurich in the field of economic geography and its intersection with political economy, sociology and political ecology. In his PhD, he is investigating how grassroots organisations from Spain have been building alternative economies and digital commons. He is particularly interested in how activist and grassroots groups have been trying to harness digital technologies towards post-capitalist transformation. Xavier also teaches human and economic geography at the University of Zurich.

FOUNDATIONS series

Hosted by Carla Leitao

Any  act of design integrates the foundations that ground us by both  willfully ignoring and also actively relearning those foundations. The  concept of the Anthropocene - accompanied by the Anthrobscene, or the  Novacene - helped name and point at processes, contexts, figures,  diagrams and agents of the transformation of our ‘ground’.  With  these reframings, we begin processes of inquiry into how to inherit  pasts, inhabit presents and what to lay as groundworks or structuring  foundations for an uncertain future.

The FOUNDATIONS Series asks what  layers will we purposely engrave, carry, remember and honor; and which  clean slates will we want to produce - which assemblies will we step  onto/into?

Inspired  by the increasingly connected "Spaceship Earth" (as named by  Buckminster Fuller), the FOUNDATIONS series zooms into key moments of  written material, systems, ideas around world building, making and  thinking - proposing discussions on the new futures for life and  livability, envisioned for our shared planet and beyond.

FOUNDATIONS is a series of events, convened by Carla Leitao, at the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale Italian Virtual Pavilion, Sezione del Padiglione Italia, as part of the "Space and Planetary Design" group under the Creative Directorship of Ed Keller. The Virtual Italian Pavilion curated by Tom Kovac, RMIT University and Alessandro Melis Portsmouth University titled CITYX Venice responds to ‘How will we live together?' curated by Hashim Sarkis MIT, organized by La Biennale di Venezia. The exhibition is open until the 21st of November.

@cityxvenice

#italianvirtualpavillion  #cityxvenice #ivp2021 #labiennaledivenezia #IVP3” 

CARLA LEITAO is an architect and writer living and working in New York, Co-Founder with Ed Keller of AUM Studio and Spec.AE.  Assistant Professor at Rensselaer Architecture  where she explores the intersection of architecture, urban systems, technology, ubiquitous cultures and emergent materiality through immersive environments (https://www.clatcraive.net/). Leitao's work and events at the Venice Biennale are part of the "Space and Planetary Design Group" by Creative Director Ed Keller, for the Italian Virtual Pavilion.