Crandall and Leitao @ Venice Biennale
Faculty News:
FOUNDATIONS: TOKEN /
JILLIAN CRANDALL, INTE GLOERICH, XAVIER BALAGUER RASILLO
Sun Oct-17, 12-2pm EST
Free event – registration required >> Link to Eventbrite
Image Credit: Jillian Crandall
Lecturer Jillian Crandall is participating this Sunday Oct-17 in the Foundation Series at the Venice Biennale, hosted by Assistant Professor Carla Leitao. Also joining the event will be Inte Gloerich (University of Amsterdam) and Xavier Balaguer Rasillo (University of Zurich)
In this session, speakers will present a range of work on the ideological foundations, theoretical suppositions, and empirical observations of cryptocurrency, blockchains, NFTs, and distributed ledger technologies on space, design, and culture. Inte Gloerich will discuss blockchain imaginaries as an emerging cultural force, deconstructing its rhetoric of mystical fascination, and exploring its power as a tool in speculative design and utopian visioning connected to theoretical underpinnings ranging from posthumanism to quantum entanglement. Jillian Crandall will raise the question – who has the power to dream – when discussing the empirical realities of crypto-utopia in Puerto Rico, where crypto-colonialism is driving an economic re-visioning of the territory, contested by feminist and grassroots groups with alternate techno-economic visions. Xavier Balaguer Rasillo further explores how grassroots organizations can harness the power of the digital to construct alternate economic post-capitalist futures in his critical look at the case of FairCoin in Catalonia, highlighting the challenges and pitfalls of crypto and the so-called “potential” of blockchain. Together the panel will question how crypto and blockchains convene publics in virtual and physical space; how distributed technologies materialize geographically with significant environmental, urban, and social impacts; and how tokens and blockchains are not just a utility or service, but also a theoretical tool that reframes how we think about value, chipping away at cracks in existing structural foundations and potentially reconstructing the foundations for more equitable design futures.
FOUNDATIONS SERIES.
HOSTED BY CARLA LEITAO
The FOUNDATIONS Series asks what layers will we purposely engrave, carry, remember and honor; and which clean slates will we want to produce – which assemblies will we step onto/into? Inspired by the increasingly connected “Spaceship Earth” (as named by Buckminster Fuller), the FOUNDATIONS series zooms into key moments of written material, systems, ideas around world building, making and thinking – proposing discussions on the new futures for life and livability, envisioned for our shared planet and beyond.
Any act of design integrates the foundations that ground us by both willfully ignoring and also actively relearning those foundations. The concept of the Anthropocene – accompanied by the Anthrobscene, or the Novacene – helped name and point at processes, contexts, figures, diagrams and agents of the transformation of our ‘ground’. With these reframings, we begin processes of inquiry into how to inherit pasts, inhabit presents and what to lay as groundworks or structuring foundations for an uncertain future.
FOUNDATIONS is a series of events, convened by Carla Leitao, at the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale Italian Virtual Pavilion, Sezione del Padiglione Italia. Curated by Tom Kovac, RMIT University and Alessandro Melis Portsmouth University titled CITYX Venice responds to ‘How will we live together?’ curated by Hashim Sarkis MIT, organized by La Biennale di Venezia. The exhibition is open until the 21st of November.