[spectre] Panel & Talk: "Fix-It-Yourself: The Art of Creating Revolutionary Economic Models" - The Kitchen NYC

[Paolo Cirio]

Fix-It-Yourself: The Art of Creating Revolutionary Economic Models.
http://whitney.org/Events/FixItYourself
Saturday, June 16, 2012  2 PM.
The Kitchen, 512 W 19th Street. NYC.

For Creative Destruction exhibition curated by ISP Curatorial Program
2012 of the Whitney Museum.
http://whitney.org/Research/ISP/CuratorialProgram/2012Exhibition

Fix-It-Yourself: The Art of Creating Revolutionary Economic Models.

Inventing alternative forms of exchange for a fair economy is one of
the most crucial creative challenges of our time. The current global
economic models and monetary policy are intimating the collapse of the
system itself, prompting a new understanding of the philosophical
underpinnings of economic theory. The artists on the panel present
distinct solutions to alter the way society shares wealth, exchanging
resources, goods, and skills through visionary means of trade. In so
doing, they propose revolutionary projects for social justice,
countering the logic of profit and willful exploitation of instability
and inequality.

The panel addresses the deep rooted problems with the conventions and
tools of international finance such as the Special Purpose Vehicles,
High-Frequency Trading, and even the Bretton Woods system, which has
influenced the daily reality of the global population. The artists
reject such nonsensical rules and strive to fix the system with new
strategies of innovation and subversion, beyond the notions of debt,
capital, and even money.

The panelists share their visions by discussing new local and digital
currencies, barter schemes, fair finance instruments, and timeshare
groups they have been involved in creating. An open debate with the
audience follows the presentations. In this lively event, the audience
gets involved in brainstorming, imagining, and finding solutions for a
large-scale implementation of the models proposed by the artists.

Speakers include Paolo Cirio, Mary Jeys, Jessie Reilly, Gregory
Sholette, and Caroline Woolard.

Paolo Cirio is an artist working around the idea of manipulation of
information’s power. His artworks unsettled Facebook, VISA,
Amazon.com, Google, and NATO, among others. He won several awards such
as Ars Electronica, Transmediale, etc., and his controversial projects
are often covered by global media such as CNN, The Age, Der Spiegel,
Libération, Apple Daily HK, etc. Paolo is a fellow at Eyebeam Art and
Technology Center for the current year, where he is developing a
project about offshore business structures among others.

Mary Jeys is a multi-media artist and activist. She founded the
Brooklyn Torch Project, a local currency initiative for North Brooklyn
in 2009 after receiving a small community grant from FEAST. The
Brooklyn Torch Project has been featured in numerous media outlets
including CNN, WNYC, NY Daily News, American Banker, and MSN Money.

Jessie Reilly has worked in the intersections of community arts,
education, and activism over the past ten years nationally and
internationally. Recently, she has been working on forming a network
with over six time-banks. As an artist she enjoys exploring all of the
different ways the arts can strengthen and celebrate communities,
campaigns, and direct actions for social justice. As an activist she
enjoys building resources and coalitions that work to strengthen and
form viable alternatives to capitalism.

Gregory Sholette is an artist, curator, writer, a founding member of
Political Art Documentation/Distribution and REPOhistory. His
publications include Dark Matter: Art and Politics in an Age of
Enterprise Culture, Collectivism After Modernism: The Art of Social
Imagination after 1945, and The Interventionists: A Users Manual for
the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life. He is the co-curator of the
exhibition It’s the Political Economy, Stupid. He is a member of Gulf
Labor Coalition, the Institute for Wishful Thinking, the Art & Labor
Working Group of OWS, and adviser for the new Home Workspace Program
in Beirut, Lebanon.

>From public seating and subway swings to collaborative projects with
mycologists, architects, and designers, Caroline Woolard makes public
projects that connect people. These projects have been supported by
the Whitney Museum, the Walker Art Center, Cooper Union, a MacDowell
Colony fellowship, a Watermill Center residency, MIT’s Center for
Civic Media. Woolard is the co-founder of Trade School, a barter-based
learning model that began in New York in 2010 and now running in ten
global cities, and OurGoods.org, supported by the Rockefeller
Foundation Cultural Innovation Fund.

This program is free of charge and open to the public; seats will be
available on a first-come, first-serve basis.

Organized in collaboration with artist Paolo Cirio, 2012 Fellow at Eyebeam.
This event is organized in conjunction with Creative Destruction on
view at The Kitchen.