[ISEA2017] Panel: Matthias Tarasiewicz — Forking as Cultural Practice: Institutional Governance after the DAO

Panel Statement

Panel: Institutions in Crisis

Keywords: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Code Governance, Code Politics, Coded Cultures, Consensus, Cryptography, Cryptopolitics, Cypher-punks, DAO, Disruption, Distributed Autonomous Organisations, Ethereum, Forking, Governance, Hacker Culture, Innovation

Since the microcomputing revolution in the 1970s we live in the age of permanent (technological) disruptions, but institutional and educational practices have barely changed. “Technologies come and go but the university remains, in a recognizable and largely unchanged form” (Flavin, 2017). Disruptive technologies, such as distributed consensus systems (blockchains, DLTs) challenge the role of the university as gatekeeper to knowledge and question the structure and organisational architecture of institutions. The only chance for traditional institutions is to find interfaces to informal and technology-driven “production cultures” (Tarasiewicz, 2011) to be able to radically reinvent the university. If the universities don’t react to technological and societal change, they will be forked, replaced, and decentralized.

  • Matthias Tarasiewicz (AT) is active as curator, researcher and technology theorist since the last millennium. He co-founded Coded Cultures (media arts festival and research platform) and is deeply involved in coding and decoding (both literally and theoretically). He researches in the fields of artistic technology, experimental documentation and cryptocurrencies. His work BitCoincloud received various prizes and has been shown internationally since 2010. He is part of the group ‘Artistic Bokeh’ and was coordinator for research projects such as ‘AXIOM – Open Source Cinema’ (EU Horizon2020), Artistic Technology Research (FWF PEEK), etc. He currently works as Board chair for the Research Institute for Arts and Technology, as Editor of the Journal for Research Cultures and as researcher and consultant for numerous block-chain initiatives. He is actively involved in fostering an interdisciplinary discourse in the field of crypto-economics and distributed consensus systems as part of the RIAT Post-Blockchain Initiative. parasew.com

Full text (PDF) p. 648-653