DisCO
DisCO is a P2P/Commons, cooperative and Feminist Economic alternative to Decentralised Autonomous Organizations (or DAOs). The DisCO (read all about it in the DisCO Elements) takes a friendly but carefully planned approach to people working together to create value in ways that are cooperative, commons-oriented and rooted in feminist economics. DisCOs are amplified by the power of Distributed Ledger/Blockchain technologies, harnessing the utility of tech without being completely tech-centric, emphasizing mutual trust and remembering to have fun.
Ela Kagel
Ela is a digital strategist and co-founder & managing director of SUPERMARKT Berlin & Platform Cooperatives Germany eG board member. Ela is the main organizer of MoneyLab Berlin. Over the past ten years Ela has created various projects, conferences and online formats dedicated to collaborative economies, inclusive tech and cooperative digital platforms. Ela has a strong interest in the art of organizing, both on the level of org methodologies and legal frameworks. In her works she focuses on exploring the potential of emerging forms of digital organizations and decentralized technologies, especially within the field of platform coops.
Ruth Catlow
Ruth is an English artist-theorist and curator whose practice focuses on critical investigations of digital and networked technologies and their emancipatory potential.
She co-leads on artistic and curatorial vision for Furtherfield and is the director of DECAL, Furtherfield’s Decentralised Arts Lab. As an artist, curator and researcher Ruth brings 25 years of experience from the intersection of arts and technology to emerging practices in art, decentralised technologies and the blockchain. She develops local, national and international arts, academic and cross-sector partnerships and is an international keynote speaker on art and technology.
Geert Lovink
Geert is the founding director of the Institute of Network Cultures, whose goals are to explore, document and feed the potential for socio-economical change of the new media field through events, publications and open dialogue. As theorist, activist and net critic, Lovink has made an effort in helping to shape the development of the web. Geert has started off the MoneyLab series with the Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam in 2014. Since then, various MoneyLab editions have been held in several countries and MoneyLab keeps on growing into network of artists, activists, and geeks experimenting with forms of financial democratization.
Arthur Röing Baer
Arthur Röing Baer is co-founder of Trust, a collective project for the research, development & maintenance of shared infrastructures and imaginaries, co-organized by Arthur Röing Baer, Calum Bowden and Joanna Pope. The project started in 2018 as a shared workspace and public programme, and developed into a hub for the creation of digital platforms, tools and online media formats. Trust is surrounded by distributed community members with backgrounds in design, art, politics, technology, and ecology. For Money Lab, Trust will present a special edition of the Cybernetic Library, an interdisciplinary browsing library that re-contextualizes the expansive history of cybernetic thought and practice. A series of talks and investigations will be streamed live from Trust’s studio.
Ailie Rutherford
Ailie is a pioneering visual artist and agitator. For over twenty years she has been collaborating and inviting people to become co-producers of work, activate public space and collectively imagine productive alternatives to the way we live. Her work explores the relationship between community activism and creative practice, deliberately provoking and asking difficult questions in order to propose new models for living and working together. Initiated by Ailie in 2015, and now collectively run, The People’s Bank of Govanhill is a long-term social artwork and feminist community currency project in Glasgow. For MoneyLab Berlin, Ailie will present String Figures, a new collaborative software for collective working centred on a principle of mutual care and co-operation.
Yael Sherill
Yael Sherill is a freelance curator, cultural manager and dramaturg working between the performing and visual arts and based in Berlin. In her work, Yael explores mediation in and as art with an emphasis on art in public space. She also researches meta-curatorial questions relating to speculative financial models for artistic production, including decentralised networks, blockchains, cooperatives and ensemble work. Yael is co-founder of the The Curatorial Collective for Public Art (CCPA). She also co-founded B_Tour, a nomadic curatorial platform dedicated to guided tours as an artistic strategy in contemporary performance, sound and visual art.
Erik Bordeleau
Erik Bordeleau is a philosopher and media theorist from Montreal, Canada. His work articulates at the intersection of political philosophy, media and financial theory, contemporary art and cinema studies. He is currently affiliated researcher at the Art, Business and Culture Center of Stockholm School of Economics and has recently taught a series of seminars in critical cryptoeconomics at the School of Disobedience (Berlin). In collaboration with Saloranta & De Vylder, he is developing The Sphere, a web 3.0 community platform for self-organisation in the performing arts. He is based in Berlin and enjoys, from time to time, the discreet charm of the precariat.
Economic Space Agency
Economic Space Agency is a 21st century financial imagination and technology collective, working on peer-to-peer economic networking protocols for post-capitalist economic expression. They call it economic media. Taking part in MoneyLab from the ECSA team, among others, Akseli Virtanen (political economist), Pekko Koskinen (game designer), Jonathan Beller (economic media architect), Jorge Lopez (distributed systems engineer), Dick Bryan (political economist), Benjamin Lee (anthropologist), Ataberk Casur (DeFi degen), Felix Fritsch (cryptocommons organizer). The Sunday session on playing organization into existence is facilitated by Pekko. He is a reality game designer, whose works include fictional religions, ways of living, populist politicians and made-up societies. The ECSA motto is: organization is a game.
Blanka Vay & Julio Linares
Blanka founded the Green Party in Hungary and left it bevor it entered in the Parliament. She was speaker and communication manager of Greenpeace, organised house occupations with homeless people, was a bicycle rider during two winters in Berlin, and now she is coordinating the community based basic income system CIRCLES. Otherwise she is an activist for feminist and queer topics. Julio is an economic anthropologist from Guatemala. He works for the Basic Income Earth Network and CIRCLES. Both Blanka & Julio are founders & board members of the Circles Coop. Blanka and Julio both run the Café Grundeinkommen, a tiny house meeting space for everyone interested in basic income at the Southern end of Friedrichstraße in Berlin.
Valentin Seehausen
Valentin is founder of the Social Coin project in Siegen/ Germany. He is a PhD candidate at the Freiburg Institute for basic income studies (FRIBIS) and studies the intersection of a basic income with community currencies and the monetary system. The social coin is a community currency in Siegen that rewards citizens for good deeds. The coins can be redeemed for lenting electric mobility (cars, bikes, scooters). It is a digital currency and will be given away as a basic income in the future. Valentin Seehausen is a pluralist economist and fullstack developer. His main interest are complimentary and community currencies, and he is a blockchain sceptic. His company, Open Currency Technology, develops technology for currencies. Other than that he like to dance tango, hike and make music.
Rachel Uwa
Rachel Uwa is an artist, educator, and director of School of Machines, Making & Make-Believe, an independent school based in Berlin, Germany, hovering at the intersection of art, technology, design, and human connection. Rachel’s biggest desire is to see people living the lives they dream of living rather than the one they feel they ought to. If that dream life is more artistic, creative, socially-engaged, technology-embracing and connects humans to each other and to themselves, well, all the better.
Yonatan Miller
Yonatan Miller is a tech worker and trade union organiser from New York and consideres Berlin home. He is currently pursuing a Masters Programme in Labour Policies and Globalisation, to further aid his research into the practical organising challenges of international solidarity in the technology sector. He co-founded the Berlin Tech Workers Coalition, and he is an activist within the alliance of Berlin Vs Amazon. He does not believe there are “shortcuts” to organising. When he is not busy fighting for justice, he can be found tweeting raccoon memes and drinking coffee, while wearing a Covid-19 mask. @shushugah
Rabea Berfelde
Rabea Berfelde is a cultural/political theorist and PhD researcher at Goldsmiths, University of London. She lives in Berlin where she is part of the campaign Deutsche Wohnen&Co Enteignen (Expropriate Deutsche Wohnen&Co) that seeks to tackle the contemporary housing crisis by facilitating a popular referendum to expropriate corporate financialised housing companies owning more than 3.000 flats in Berlin.
Lenara Verle
Lenara is a Berlin-based artist and a researcher with a focus on collaboration, community currencies and money experiments. Lenara is also founder of Coinspiration, an online platform that promotes new forms of currencies and value exchange in order to contribute to a better world. Lenara is co-creating the Invisible Economy together with Dada.art. More info about Lenara here: www.lenara.com
Calum Bowden
Calum Bowden creates stories, worlds, and platforms that reimagine relations between organisms and algorithms, humans and nonhumans, the Earth and the cosmos. He co-founded Trust and Black Swan, an experimental digital initiative designed to eat the art world by channeling resources from established institutions to cultural practitioners. Calum took part in the post-graduate program at the Strelka Institute, Moscow. He has an MA in Design Interactions from the Royal College of Art and a BSc in Anthropology from University College London.
Inte Gloerich
Inte is a PhD student at Transmission in Motion (Utrecht University) focusing on the sociotechnical imaginaries in blockchain art, design, and products. She is also a researcher at the Institute of Network Cultures (Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences) and has been a part of the MoneyLab project for the past 5 years. Her work there involves the politics, artistic imagination, and (counter)cultures surrounding digital technology, digital economy, and online identity. She co-edited MoneyLab Reader 2: Overcoming the Hype (with Geert Lovink and Patricia de Vries) and State Machines: Reflections and Actions at the Edge of Digital Citizenship (with Yiannis Colakides and Marc Garrett).
Money Lab Board
A globally dispersed board has been set up to expand the network, explore emerging topics, and support initiatives of the network. The (initial) MoneyLab board consists of:
Max Haiven, Canada Research Chair in Culture, Media and Social Justice at Lakehead University, Denise Thwaites, curator and Assistant Professor in Digital Arts and Humanities at the University of Canberra, Akseli Virtanen, founder of Economic Space Agency (ECSA), Nathaniel Tkacz, Reader at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies at Warwick University, Ela Kagel, managing director of SUPERMARKT Berlin and Geert Lovink, founding director of the Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences.
Laura Lotti
Laura Lotti investigates the relations between technological, economic and cultural systems. She is a researcher at Other Internet, where she collaboratively explores emerging dynamics in networked cultures. She co-founded Black Swan, an experiment in decentralising artworlds incubated at Trust.
Sarah Friend
Sarah Friend is an artist and software engineer, specializing in blockchain and the p2p web. She is a participant in the Berlin Program for Artists, a co-curator of Ender Gallery, an artist residency taking place inside the game Minecraft, an alumni of Recurse Centre, and an organiser of Our Networks, a conference on all aspects of the distributed web. For the past two years she has been working on Circles UBI, a p2p community currency that acts like a universal basic income. It was launched to the public in October 2020 in Berlin. Her recent exhibitions include: crypto_manifold at the Chronus Art Centre in Shanghai, screensaver watching you at On Site Project, Mutek.SF Nexus in San Francisco, and The Art of No Likes residency at Arebyte Gallery, in London.
Mat Dryhurst
Mat Dryhurst makes art in Berlin. He teaches at NYU’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music, and is co-host of the Interdependence podcast.
Wassim Alsindi
Wassim is the founder and host of the 0x Salon, conducting experiments in post-disciplinary collective knowledge practices involving discourse, art and writing. He works on conceptual design and philosophy of token economies and cryptocurrencies, in addition to writing and editorial responsibilities at publications including the MIT Computational Law Report. Previously, Wassim co-founded MIT’s Cryptoeconomic Systems (CES) journal and conference series and developed novel characterisation approaches for crypto-assets and networks such as the regulatory epistemology project TokenSpace.
