TABOO - TRANSGRESSION - TRANSCENDENCE

I would like to present a chapter of my forthcoming practice-based dissertation on Post-capitalist imaginaries and expanded media practice. This analysis consists of three case studies of ongoing projects I have initiated since 2016 and situates these projects as part of a discussion of emergence, affect and ideology within technological and social networks pertaining to the blockchain. However, the scope of this thesis is not limited to the blockchain as a technical object, in as much as I am seeking to look at the context that produces the blockchain through adjacent methods including autoethnography, academic speed metal and expanded media art practice. 

The case studies will include creative research projects I have developed both independently and collaboratively including the Distributed Art Object Framework, Dungeon Master’s DungeonCoin project, and Diggers. These case studies are all historical, ongoing, and/or emergent projects whose analysis using these adjacent methods reveals how expanded media practices have the potential to produce post-capitalist imaginaries. These post-capitalist imaginaries are directly correlated between the production of knowledge, culture and economy and seek to propose a set of relations through which we come to understand post-capitalism as an emergent praxis for understanding and remediating tendencies within late-stage capitalism.

The fundamental perspective of this thesis is that the blockchain is a space that reproduces itself through a feedback loop between ideology, technology and sociality. However, this potentially leads to a cul de sac whereby one’s participation in that space only serves to amplify the tendencies one originally sought to intervene in. Therefore, this dissertation radically diverges from that line of research, instead drawing on the history of electronic art performance and community media through Expanded Media Practice, to examine how performance and space can be produced differently if emerging media is treated as a design space.