Feb 3 / The Future of Money
Feb 3 / The Future of Money
This afternoon in the Open Zone, video musician and media theorist Gabriel Shalom and Open Design City co-founder Jay Cousins presented their findings on the ‘future of money’ through a short film of the same title, along with a documentation of their process which resulted a humorous video blog – mainly the guys and their co-conspirator Venessa Miemis, eating plate upon plate of Asian food in Berlin and discussing their next move.
Both Shalom and Cousins are particularly interested in the perspectives of young people and their view on the future of money simply because that discourse generally excludes people under 35 – a fact that is unsatisfactory considering that today’s generation tend to have a better understanding of virtual technologies, since they were born and raised with them.
Their film The Future of Money – which is a series of talking heads theorists reexamining the notions of value and wealth in the context of a digital age – was presented by the trio last October in Amsterdam at Sibos, the world’s largest industry summit for bankers about banking. During today’s workshop, Shalom and Cousins recounted the process of developing the project, and the guts it took to get them through the heavy doors of a conference for commerce.
As for funding the film Shalom said they received almost $6000 from Paypal clicks on the project’s blog page. “We had a very well-off target audience, meaning bankers, and we had four donations come in that were a thousand plus dollars, which is highly unusual.”
For Shalom, the most shocking moment during the Sibos conference was, as an artist, “sitting amongst all these men in suits and feeling like I was literary from another planet. It was horrifying, because bankers are actually controlling the world’s economy. Maybe not in an insidious way, although that could be debatable, but certainly in a power-based way. They have an immense amount of power over our society, over our fears, over our values, over our self-confidence. So much is pegged upon how much money you have, so their lack of exposure to alternative cultures of economics was astonishing to me.”
Cousins, on the other hand, was surprised by “the core desire from bankers in the banking community to continue this conversation in recognition that we are facing severe challenges in the economic system…They need to start looking at how to assist in changing the mentality of the banking system and its structure.”
Continues Shalom of the conference, “Certainly, the door was open in a very interesting way. Even though we come from different planets, these members were very open to having us there and they were very impressed by what we had to say. We have an ongoing dialogue with them now, so there might be other opportunities to participate in their events in the future and hopefully open that door wider.”
This evening’s final keynote presentation, Digital Liveness – Realtime, Desire and Sociability, attempted to define the transmediale.11 theme of liveness through three separate lectures by Philip Auslander, Eric Kluitenberg and Mushon Zer Aviv. Auslander, however, approached the concept of liveness through a mere decision to accept its claims, rather than split hairs between live-in-person, recorded live, broadcasted live, or even digital liveness. On Auslander’s terms, liveness is not a characteristic of a virtual entity. Rather, liveness exists when a virtual entity makes a claim that it is live – through a quick response or interactivity with a human – and we embrace that claim into our consciousness.
And on the topic of live, the program LIVE:RESPONSE offers several performances at HKW this evening. The Collapse of PAL plays upon the nuances of the signal in an AV performance by Rosa Menkman, and the marriage between digital and analogue is witnessed in the pre-recorded vinyl loops of Self-Reproduction Loops by Eosin.
transmediale Blog
by Melanie Sevcenko