MoneyLab #X Economythologies
Critical thinking, making and trading for the ‘New World Disorder’
Canberra/Hobart, November 5-6, 2020
“Myth is very precisely the incantation that gives rise to a world…” – Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community (1986)
In a time of eco-crises, techno-uto/dystopias, disaster capitalism and necropolitics, communities the world over are compelled to examine the economic systems and narratives that have driven them towards cataclysm. As Janus-faced digital economies, venture capitalists, fintech merchants and enterprise software barons increasingly mediate labour relations in a proto/peri-pandemic world, a vortex of imperialism invents new ways to extract value from the ever-expanding precariat. In this context, we hurtle into futures formed by technologies that engender their own community mythos, embracing their indeterminate aesthetics and modalities.
In The Inoperative Community, Nancy describes myth as a recitation through which community is conjured; its origins narrated, its destinies explained (or interrupted). Today myths are propagated, busted, contorted and exported through myriad of file formats, fiscal loopholes and economic fora. While the pataphysical geographies of finance create offshore tax-havens for the oligarchy, the glamour of this expedient economic rhetoric is forever undermined by the stench of its desolation.
MoneyLab #X Economythologies critically explores the working and un-working of myths that have/do/will shape our economic realities today. Embracing the non-linearity of time and the multiplicity of actants that construct our economythologies, the event seeks to widen the aperture of our future. As the vital urgency of class and social movements such as Bla(c)k Lives Matter demand a fierce reckoning with the colonial provenance of financial networks and technologies that continue to impoverish and enslave, the informal care economies that sustain communities through the pandemic crisis demonstrate their exuberant currency beyond financial markets. The mythic mantra of “jobs and growth” is increasingly met with a UBI chorus, while tech messiahs worship at the feet of false-techno-gods. With this in mind, how might we harness critical myth-making in the radical re-imagining of finance and economy? What new protagonists might emerge, or be exorcised through this process? How might we conjure, in the words of VNS Matrix (1991) “the virus of the new world disorder/rupturing the symbolic from within” as “saboteurs of big daddy mainframe”?
MoneyLab #X Economythologies is the first in ML series to be hosted and broadcast from the Southern Hemisphere. Hooray /0/ \0/ \0\ for the Asia Pacific turn. Conveners Denise Thwaites and Nancy Mauro-Flude, responding to the constraints of COVID-19, have designed a program that will be launched by small scale events at Ainslie+Gorman Arts Centre (Canberra, ACT) and Bett Gallery (Hobart, TAS) on 5th-6th November 2020 (livestreamed online), alongside an exhibition program.
Economythologies will continue the ML agenda of engaging artists, researchers, curators, collectors, activists, and geeks in the radical interrogation and re-imagination of financial networks, technologies and cultural discourses with a special emphasis on projects that stretch across our planetary archipelago from Australia, Asia, the Pacific and beyond. We will ask: How are emergent digital economies of the Asia-Pacific forging new chapters in the history of techno-empires and decentralized communities? How can Indigenous knowledge systems that provide strategies to resist the settler-colonial impulses of advanced capitalism be suitably enabled? How can more attention be brought to these lores that have been present since time immemorial? Amidst apocalyptic bushfires and drought, will homo ecologicus replace the tired homo economicus? How do the false scarcities, opaque markets, machinery and instable infrastructures of 21st century digital culture demand radical reconfigurations for the on-going transmission and interruption of our community mythos?
We are thrilled invite you to join us for MoneyLab #X Economythologies on November 5/6 2020, as we navigate the iridescence of money — its symbols, systems, artefacts and technologies — as its gives rise to worlds in transition.
Love from the DankCyberSwamp (Australia).
This event is co-presented by Centre for Creative and Cultural Research (University of Canberra), Institute for Culture and Society (Western Sydney University), School of Art and Design (Australian National University), Contemporary Art and Social Transformation (RMIT University), Ainslie+Gorman Art Centre, Bett Gallery and Despoinas Media Coven with the support of the Institute of Network Cultures.
Dates: 5-6th November, 2020
Physical satellite events at Ainslie+Gorman Arts Centre (ACT) and Bett Gallery (TAS)
Livestreaming at economythologies.network <watch this space>
Contact via twitter @economythology
Topics:
Decolonising Money: Colonial Impulses, Systems Sovereignty and Economic Autonomy // From Decentralized Islands to Techno-Empires: Transforming Economies of the Asia Pacific // Financial Charismatics: Language, Rhetoric and the Seduction of New Money //Homo Ecologicus: Money Between Ecology and Economy //_Underscored Economics_: Trading Re-Authored Currencies // Impermanent Infrastructures: Capricious Commerce of Digital Culture
*VNS Matrix (1991) The Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century https://vnsmatrix.net/projects/the-cyberfeminist-manifesto-for-the-21st-century