How can LARPing be a testbed for new political possibilities? Might DAOs serve as “underground prototypes” for fostering movements? Penny Rafferty explores these questions through her work as an artist, critic, and builder of collective worlds. Under the mantle of projects like Radical Friends, Omsk Social Club, and Black Swan, Penny’s work takes propositions that are brought up in the blockchain space and deploys them to other, broader ends, engaging with the structures of collective organizing and harnessing the intellectual spaces opened up by emerging technology to serve different contexts.

In this conversation, Penny talks about what DAOs are as well as what they could be. She also reflects on the moments of communal experience that have shaped her way of thinking, recalling time spent in the punk and hardcore music scenes and Black Bloc protests, alongside her experience banding together with other artists, writers and curators in rapidly-gentrifying Berlin to explore how institutions could better support artists earlier in their careers – and how, in each of these settings, tools from the emergent world of DAOs might help.

The discussion also turns to quadratic voting, the utility of roleplaying and paper prototyping for bringing complex concepts to a wider public, and the importance of tools that empower people access the collective decision-making skills that contemporary political systems often fail to cultivate. She and Simon talk emoji voting, decision-making frameworks beyond absolutism, and why AI will not spell the death of creative production – but it might mean we need new ways of funding it.

Seed Phrase is a project by Simon Denny for THE NEW INSTITUTE. This conversation was recorded in Berlin at Studio Jot, edited in Hamburg by fx:one, and made possible by Georg Diez, Lieke Fröberg, and Alice Gustson and The New Institute, with research and additional support by Adina Glickstein. The music for this podcast is by Amnesia Scanner, from their Web3 project SCAMMER, which was released as a series of NFTs.

Links:

Radical Friends book

Black Swan

A Speculative White Paper on the Aesthetics of a Black Swan World

To Mitchell F. Chan, cryptocurrencies and artworks are both distillations of faith. Through exploring how art objects circulate and hold value, he’s revealed how crypto markets and art markets are “comically analogous”, even if they often refuse to see the ways in which they mirror one another.

The Toronto-based artist joins Simon to talk about the making of his Digital Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility, which tapped into the medium-specific potential of blockchains to connect NFTs back into the longer history of conceptual art in canny and perceptive ways. In this episode of Seed Phrase, Mitchell gives insight into Digital Zones – considered by some to have been an NFT before the time of NFTs – and reflect on the wisdom of figures from Yves Klein to Andrea Fraser, who laid bare the mechanics of building collective belief. Quipping that “a bitcoin is a receptacle of faith,” he challenges us to ask: could crypto’s lack of intrinsic value be its hidden superpower?

Also in this conversation: reflections from the early days of the CryptoPunks Discord, a deep-dive into generative art and its marketplaces, and an argument in favor of the fact that “art is a redundancy.” Together, Mitchell and Simon wonder: what will have staying power, outlasting crypto’s boom and bust cycles? Dwelling on the difficulty of predicting an artwork’s reception and value, they conclude that uncertainty is not a limitation, but rather, the space where innovation and beauty are produced.

Seed Phrase is a project by Simon Denny for THE NEW INSTITUTE. This conversation was recorded in Berlin at Studio Jot, edited in Hamburg by fx:one, and made possible by Georg Diez, Lieke Fröberg, and Alice Gustson and The New Institute, with research and additional support by Adina Glickstein. The music for this podcast is by Amnesia Scanner, from their Web3 project SCAMMER, which was released as a series of NFTs.

Links:

Digital Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility

LeWitt Generator Generator

Winslow Homer’s Croquet Challenge

Do NFTs merely privatize ideas to generate profit? Or can they open up other pathways to political participation? Lee Tzu-Tung digs into these questions throughout her multifaceted practice – which spans visual art installations, workshops, and socially-engaged initiatives that creatively harness technology and artistic narrative-craft. Based between Chicago and Taipei, Tzu-Tung’s work grapples with Taiwan’s complex political landscape – with particular attention to women, queer communities, and indigenous movements.

From building a “bionic cryptocurrency” raising awareness of HIV to (speculatively) fractionalizing ownership of several milliliters of the South China Sea, Tzu-Tung has explored the manifold ways that artworks using blockchains and market design as a medium can be a lever for a plurality of political positions. “The most important thing about a technology is being accessible to different people with different abilities,” Tzu-Tung observes, expounding on the design challenges that still need to be overcome if blockchain can reach its fullest potential as a tool for decentralized organizing, especially at the global scale.

In this conversation, she also explains how her practice is one of “prolonged undercover performance art”, reflects on the limitations of NFTs as they currently stand, and discusses the origin of her interest in art that plays with markets – owing to the myth of a magical mountain in Taiwan where semiconductors are manufactured. If one thread can be said to unify Tzu-Tung’s wide-ranging practice, it’s an emphatic belief that the future is open-source.

Seed Phrase is a project by Simon Denny for THE NEW INSTITUTE. This conversation was recorded in Berlin at Studio Jot, edited in Hamburg by fx:one, and made possible by Georg Diez, Lieke Fröberg, and Alice Gustson and The New Institute, with research and additional support by Adina Glickstein. The music for this podcast is by Amnesia Scanner, from their Web3 project SCAMMER, which was released as a series of NFTs.

Links:

Artist website

Forkonomy

Positive Coin