Radical Friends: DAO Summit for Decentralisation of Power and Resources in the Artworld
Radical Friends discusses the value of and pathways to peer-produced decentralised digital infrastructures for art, culture and society. It aims to create a new environment for mutual aid and solidarity in the cultural sector. By bringing together ground-breaking players from the cultural sector and decentralised peer-to-peer technologists, the summit explores how traditional organisational patterns can be transformed through decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs) enabled by blockchain technology.
The 8-hour program includes lectures, panel discussions and concerts as well as hybrid talk and body-work formats. Throughout the event, the participants are invited to discuss, analyse, and map the obstacles, opportunities, and implications of progressive, decentralised organisations and automation in the art world. Lightning talks by Kei Kreutler, and Rhea Myers and more offer space for dialogue. During the summit, four prototypes will be presented and the audience will collectively award a development grant funded by the Goethe-Institut.
Radical Friends is curated by Ruth Catlow and Penny Rafferty in dialogue with Sarah Johanna Theurer and Julia Pfeiffer. Participants include James Whipple (eea; M.E.S.H.), OMSK Social Club, Jaya Klara Brekke, Harm Van Den Dorpel, Cem Dagdelen, Aude Launay, Sarah Friend, Laura Lotti and Calum Bowden (Black Swan), Bhavisha Panchia and Carly Whitaker (Covalence Studios), Nicolay Spesivtsev and Dzina Zhuk (eeefff) and Massimiliano Mollona (Ensembl).
The summit is part of the Goethe-Institut project “Lockdown Lessons”. It searches for answers on what can be learned from the Covid-19 crisis on a global scale concerning social, technological, postcolonial and civil society concerns.
Radical Friends presents results from the DAOWO (Decentralised Autonomous Organisations with Others) project, co-founded by the Goethe-Institut London and Furtherfield. DAOWO is a transnational collaborative network that has been bringing together leading international institutions and communities from the arts and technology for three years to question the advantages and disadvantages of blockchain technologies for art, culture and society from a local perspective.