Blockchain

The blockchain technology underpins the digital currency Bitcoin, which was created in 2008. We could describe it as an encrypted digital spreadsheet which is shared between users and records financial data and transactions, contracts and bilateral agreements without the intervention of a central administrator, such as banks.

The festival Blockchain: Utopia or U–turn?, which is held on the weekends of 9-10 and 16-17 January at the Onassis Stegi, invites thinkers, artists and hackers to discuss the dialectic of resistance and recuperation which characterizes blockchain technology. Although blockchain has mainly been adopted by investors and entrepreneurs, it is also extensively employed by communities that explore radical and alternative uses to which the technology can be put in the arts, music, media and governance.

But the new technology raises political and ethical questions, since, while it achieves social reciprocity and removes the need for mediators, it also presents an investment opportunity for a new — digital — elite.

Click here to read a glossary about Blockchain

Curated by: Voltnoi Brege & Quetempo

In English

PROGRAM

SATURDAY 9 FEBRUARY
An introduction on blockchain, money and hi-tech finance

18:00-18:30 | Voltnoi & Quetempo

History of money

18:30-19:00 | George Papageorgiou

Blockchain, down the rabbithole

19:00-19:30 | Denis Jaromil Rojo

Bitcoin, the end of the Taboo on Money

19:45-20:30 | Benjamin H. Bratton

Tokens: A Rorschach Test

20:30-21:15 | Saskia Sassen

Predatory Formations Dressed in Wall Street Suits and Algorithmic Math

SUNDAY 10 FEBRUARY
Blockchain as a form of governance, law and social empowerment

18:00-18:30 | Dimitris Vourakis

Code=Law?

18:30-19:00 | Marco Sachy

How blockchain technology can foster social innovation

19:00-19:30 | Brett Scott

Visions of a Techno-Leviathan: The Battle of Blockchain Ideologies

SATURDAY 16 FEBRUARY
Blockchain applications and speculations in the arts

18:00-18:30 | Matthew Liston

Faith machines: amplified reflexivity between value and belief

18:30-19:00 | Ruth Catlow (Furtherfield)

Artists Re:Thinking the blockchain

19:00-19:30 | Kei Kreutler

Autonomous ecologies at a distance

19:30-20:00 | Mat Dryhurst

Own or be Owned: A stake in the heart of undead music

23:00-6:00 | Cryptorave party | by !Mediengruppe Bitnik + Omsk Social Club
with: Arpanet, Amnesia Scanner, Bill Kouligas, M.E.S.H., Voltnoi

SUNDAY 17 FEBRUARY
A critique on blockchain technologies

19:00-19:30 | Jaya Klara Brekke

Authority, autonomy and trust - a political history of blockchain

19:30-20:00 | David Gerard

Critique on Blockchain

20:00-20:30 | Jemima Kelly

Banking on the blockchain is a bad idea

20:30-21:00 | James Bridle

New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future