Monetary Utopias with Jaromil & Marco Sachy, Enric Duran, Christian Nold, Mansour Ciss Kanakassy, Baruch Gottlieb :: CONFERENCE: MCDate – le café numérique | Upgrade! Paris with Mal au Pixel Festival; June 17, 2011; 7:00 pm :: Maison des Métallos, 94 Rue Jean-Pierre Timbaud, 75011 Paris + and on Digitalarti live stream.

For its sixth edition, Mal au Pixel Festival — dedicated to the Open Source and DIY Cultures — looks at the issue of alternative money and currencies through a series of public lectures. This conferences panel is associated to an exhibition at Plateforme Gallery, with Paolo Cirio, Baruch Gottlieb & Mansour Ciss Kanakassy, DYNDY, Christian Nold.

Jaromil and Marco Sachy (Nl) DYNDY – Imagine the Future of Money:

DYNDY is a collective platform, an effort at building a Pattern Language for Alternative and Complementary Money Systems to inform and empower grassroots communities with concepts and tools to overcome scarcity, instruments and reflections for the Exodus from proprietary money. DYNDY gathers researchers and practitioners in the fields of philosophy of economics and technology, activists and hackers, developers and visionaries. They hope to share plenty of resources for collective agencies to weave diverse networks of values that are sustainable, resilient and socially responsible. For example, the virtual currency BitCoin or the Banking platform Cyclos aim to free and decentralized banking services.

Enric Duran (Sp):

In 2008, Enric Duran, anticapitalist activist, ‘borrowed’ 492 000 euros in loans with several banks as part of political action to denounce the bank system, and used the money to support initiatives turned toward an alternative society and to publish 200 000 copies of a magazine “We can live without capitalism.” Cooperativa Integral is a self management project based in Catalonia which intends to put together gradually all the basic elements in the economy such as production, consumption, financing and own currency for a transition to enable us to build a way of life where neither bank nor state will be required.

Christian Nold (Uk) Bijlmer Euro:

The Bijlmer Euro is an complimentary local currency for South East of Amsterdam which creates economic benefits for local people, inspires social connections and builds a complex network identity for the Bijlmer. The Bijlmer Euro is a standard Euro banknote, which has a special Bijlmer Euro sticker attached to its surface. The stickers contain a unique electronic RFID-tag, so one can trace the route that the money is travelling through the Bijlmer from shop to shop. These movements are translated into a real-time visualisation that can be found here. In 2011, Christian Nold is invited by Pixelache to renew this experiments on Suomenlinna island.

Christian Nold is an artist, designer and educator working to develop new participatory models for communal representation.

Mansour Ciss Kanakassy et Baruch Gottlieb (Sn, Ca), AFRO:

AFRO is the first Pan-African currency, an art project developed since 2002, an imaginary currency embodied by a series of bills designed and printed by the artists Mansour Ciss Kanakassy and Baruch Gottlieb, at Déberlinisation Laboratory. The AFRO is proposed as an alternative to the Franc CFA (the original French colony’s currency in Africa renamed Franc Communaute Financiere Africaine), the currency of several countries in Africa, constituting a part of the Franc Zone. After this action, the artists proposed the “Global Pass” which gives the possibility to move around like a World Citizen, and work everywhere and to benefit from health insurance; and the “AFRO Express card”, offering a way to store and spend its AFRO anywhere in the world.

See also:

Exhibition, June 9 – 19, 2011 :: Opening June 9 :: U$ER FRIENDLY meeting with Paulo Cirio :: June 19, 2011 :: Plateforme, 73 rue des Haies, 75020 Paris.

Paolo Cirio (It): P2P Gift Credit Card, by Paolo Cirio, proposes an alternative economy based on Peer-to-Peer architecture for a more equal sharing of wealth in society. It offers an innovative participative system using counterfeit virtual money. By issuing a visionary type of credit card, the project introduces the P2P Gift Finance system based on People-to-People free credit shared across digital networks. The P2P Gift Finance is a democratic creation of money directly regulated by ordinary people in order to redistribute wealth in society. The website P2PGiftCredit.com allows people to generate unique virtual card numbers to send to others via digital devices and platforms. A limited edition of physical plastic P2P Gift Credit Cards are available by request at P2PGiftCredit.com.

Upgrade! Paris is the french node of Upgrade! International network: monthly sessions about the digital art scene.