Blocumenta — Who We Are, Why We’re Here.
Blocumenta is an experimental and community-driven arts project that explores the promise and challenges of decentralisation for arts and culture. In particular it considers the role of ‘peripheral’ stakeholders and communities in destabilising the centralised value systems that have long plagued the contemporary art world.
Over the past half-decade, the Blockchain space has cultivated an array of artist-led projects interrogating the significance of distributed-ledger technology for the arts and culture sector.
Predictably, we see a number of products that support existing Artworld economies emerge such as the defunct Ascribe or the more recent Artchain Global. The potential industry impact of this tech is attested to by Christie’s 2018 Art + Tech Summit on Blockchain. Conversely, programs such as DECAL, State Machines, MoneyLab, There Is No Such Thing as Blockchain Art and the exhibition Proof of Work, showcase an energetic and vital critique that creative practitioners and cultural theorists offer to the crypto-sphere. Indeed the forthcoming ETHBerlinZwei positions itself as a culture festival, its artistic program highlighting the important role creative communities may have in the broader Ethereum community and discourse.
Yet despite the excitement we may share in the lively discussion and production that emerges from the aforementioned programs, the decentralising promise of blockchain technology remains vulnerable to a history of eurocentrism. Despite distinct efforts made by European organisations to include voices across the Global South, do we lose an important opportunity presented by blockchain technologies by falling-back on cultural imperialist tendencies to ‘look to Europe’ or the USA as cultural references par excellence? How can we build new decentralised online communities, when the loudest and most numerous of voices reiterate the historical dominance one seeks to destabilise? Most pressingly, how can we in the Asia-Pacific Region, for example, empower globally distributed, local cultural engagement with decentralised technologies, investing and supporting these initiatives whilst embracing their radical differences?
It is with these questions in mind that Blocumenta has embarked on a program of local, community-engaged experimentation in dialogue with international partners. Most recently we presented the Blocumenta Blockathon with Bitfwd at Artspace Sydney, Australia, an event that was supported by The University of Canberra, The Australian National University, The Australian Capital Territory Government, Sigma Prime and DAOstack. The methodologies and outcomes of this particular experiment will be discussed in future posts and publications (watch this space!). But put briefly, the program pilots creative learning strategies departing from Rancière’s radical practice of equality, re-centring participants typically conceived as peripheral stakeholders (respondents to/consumers of technology) in the prototyping of frontier blockchain use-cases. Our particular experiments with the decentralised hack model have been discussed by Daniel Bar, while an example of creative and critical collaboration arising through this experiment is recounted by Tom Terado.
To complement this emphasis on local community engagement, Blocumenta delves into the dynamics of cooperative cultural action crossing national borders, this openness serving as a tactic to resist centralisation through cultural isolationism. In this complex pursuit, Blocumenta has connected with globally distributed projects such as The DAAO, Iconomia, and is now seeking further networks across the Asia-Pacific Region.
Can our communities flourish as discrete mushroom rings sprouting across continents, while remaining connected in our cooperative efforts? The ability to respond to such questions will be central to understanding the on-going impact of blockchain technologies upon the cultural sphere.
