MoneyLab #3 is in two weeks and we are excited to present our evening program. It will take place at Mezrab on Thursday 1 of December at 7 pm, after a first day of panel discussions on global finance and how to fail better, on the music industry and its revenue models as well as workshops on the blockchain technology and its social and political impact and artworks.
During our unique evening program, the University of the Phoenix Eulogy for Excellence Dinner (the world’s first private institution providing financial education to the dead) will cordially invites dead and not-yet-dead participants in MoneyLab #3 and their guests to its convocation ceremony. Attendees will hear inspiring words from the University’s executive board and have a rare opportunity to meet successful graduates, who have risen up from the grave to seize their potential and achieve their terminal degree as revenge consultants. We will also be celebrating a very special honorary degree recipient and awarding our annual scholarships to currently-living people whose financial crimes are so heinous they deserve immediate and lethal matriculation.
The evening’s highlights include the awarding of an honorary doctoral degree to Hannah Arendt, one of the most influential refugee thinkers of the 20th century. Arendt’s work connects totalitarianism, evil, economics and imperialism, themes very important to the university’s graduates. She will be joining us “live” thanks to the help of Dawn, a very powerful, perceptive and political medium, who is also an activist with Strike Debt. Because spirits only tend to speak in metaphors, Geert Lovink will pose questions to Arendt and also help interpret her answers.
After this very special encounter Fine Art Financ€ Lab, will with its Funancial Exercises try to alternate the standardized rational logic behind financial elements and trigger a reflection on individual and collective beliefs and habits around the financial dimension.
- Exercise 1: Thermometer Game is an ice-breaker dynamic that involves a body movement as a reaction to a question. A ludic and inclusive collective performance that has the aim to physically and publicly manifest some of our individual / collective associations towards money. While triggering the exposition of the private in the public, Thermometer Game seeks to connect some of our mental paradigms with the body. At the same time Thermometer Game serves as a census of the general concerns of MoneyLab #3’s audience.
- Exercise 2: Open Mic Night – Dedicated to Your Money. What would you tell your money if you could talk to it? With the intention of humanizing and humorizing our affiliation to the financial dimension, Open Mic Night – Dedicated to Your Money invites you to write a song, poem or letter to your money. It is the chance to manifest and express all your emotional associations: attachment, desire, dependence, independence, or whatever your feeling is, towards it. After the writing session, through an open mic session you will be able to share and perform your result to the audience.
Last but not least, Finally The Demi, by Tori Abernathy: The violence that the financial sector inflicts upon us – psychologically, physically, and financially – is derived from its supposed abstraction. It makes it difficult to see that what gives debt, what gives the lease, what gives the dollar its value is our buy-in. Credit relies on our faith in the promise that the dollar will be there tomorrow. The Demi pokes at the holes in this fabled abstraction, empowering individuals to co-author a new relationship to value, while embracing the absurdity of the dollar. The Demi is a new kind of quantitative easing for the people, by the people.
Join us for MoneyLab #3 on the 1st and 2nd of December at Pakhuis de Zwijger, Amsterdam. See the full program here or buy tickets here.