March 3: Blockchain, Crypto, NFT, WTF?
Co-presented by Minneapolis College of Art and Design and Eyebeam; Sponsored by Smaby Family Foundation
This spring MCAD will host a series of three discussions critically exploring Web3 topics and their impact on artists, designers, and organizations. Our goal is to cut through the hype and utopian/dystopian narratives, while introducing participants to the basics of Web3 terms and activities. From the blockchain to NFTs, to crypto to distributed autonomous organizations (DAOs), we will hear from artists, curators, and leaders who are critics, participants, and/or informed observers. We will explore criticisms, including the environmental impacts of NFTs, the financial hype and belief that NFTs are a nefarious scheme, the impact on creative practitioners, and the aversion of many creatives to the block-chain economy and NFTs.
Speaker bios:
Regina Harsanyi is passionate about improving and educating on best practices for the longevity of variable media, from plastics to distributed ledger technologies. A graduate of New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, Harsanyi has primarily focused on time-based media art from historical and technical perspectives in both private and public sectors. She has led major time-based media preventive conservation projects for multiple institutions, studios, and collectors, including the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, Museum of the Moving Image, bitforms gallery, and TRANSFER gallery. From 2017-2020, Harsanyi also facilitated over 200 exhibitions across 26 locations under Wallplay, many of which highlighted the legitimacy of creative technology. She remains dedicated to creating interdisciplinary bridges between academia, museums, collectors, corporations, and artists to better serve the longevity of complex works of art.
Kevin McCoy works in collaboration with Jennifer McCoy. They are New York-based digital media artists whose works extends from film and video to installation and generative software. Recent work includes generative software that uses blockchain technology to create long-term ecosystems for images to live, die, and evolve. The McCoys' work has been widely exhibited in the U.S. and around the world–including exhibitions at the Pompidou Center in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, British Film Institute Southbank in London, Hermitage in St. Petersburg, and Sundance Film Festival. Their work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Milwaukee Art Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. They received a Creative Capital award in 2003 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2011. In 2014, Kevin collaborated with Anil Dash to co-create Monegraph, short for “monetized graphics”, cited as the first NFT.
Kyle McDonald is an artist working with code. He crafts interactive installations, sneaky interventions, playful websites, workshops, and toolkits for other artists working with code. He explores the possibilities of new technologies to understand how they affect society, to misuse them, and to build alternative futures; aiming to share a laugh, spark curiosity, create confusion, and share spaces with magical vibes. McDonald works with machine learning, computer vision, and social and surveillance tech spanning the commercial and arts spaces. He was previously an adjunct professor at NYU's ITP, member of F.A.T. Lab, community manager for openFrameworks, and artist-in-residence at STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at CMU and YCAM in Japan. His work has been commissioned and shown around the world, including at the V&A, NTT ICC, Ars Electronica, Sonar, Todays Art, and Eyebeam.
Dr. Khendum Gyabak is the Director of Online Teaching and Learning at MCAD. Her background intersects technology, design, and education. She has a long history of innovating, teaching, and learning. She facilitates faculty learning in higher education and designs equitable educational projects and capacity-building for K-12 teachers, healthcare workers, and community stakeholders in the U.S., Bhutan, Nepal, and Papua New Guinea.
March 30: Web3: Collective Organizing and Autonomous Organizations
Kate Beecroft works on ecosystem and community building at Centrifuge, the decentralised asset financing protocol. She has been involved in Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) since 2018 and brings to them her experience of self-managing organisations as the co-founder of Greaterthan and a long-time member of Enspiral. She is co-author of the 2020 paper 'The Dissensus Protocol' and has contributed to research papers for the European Commission about blockchains for social and public good.
Lauren Ruffin is a thinker, designer, & leader interested in building strong, sustainable, anti-racist systems & organizations. I’m into exploring how we can leverage new technologies to combat racial and economic injustice. They have nearly 20 years experience in policy, marketing, business development, and strategic planning in the for-profit and nonprofit sectors. She is the co-founder of CRUX, an Albuquerque-based immersive storytelling cooperative that collaborates with Black artists as they create content in virtual reality and augmented reality (XR). Currently she is the interim Chief Marketing Officer of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA), where she focuses on amplifying the stories and activism of the YBCA community. Prior to joining YBCA, she was co-CEO of Fractured Atlas, the largest association of independent artists in the United States In 2017, she started Artist Campaign School, an educational program that has trained 74 artists to run for political office to date.
Colin Self (b. 1987 Oregon, USA) composes music, performance, and environments that expand consciousness and trouble binaries as well as boundaries of perception and communication. They work with communities across disciplines and use immaterial and material means – including voices, bodies, and computers – to interface with and reimagine worlds. Self is a frequent collaborator with artists including Holly Herndon, Planningtorock, Martine Syms, and Geo Wyeth. Their most recent commissions include The World to Come, composed for Berlin’s State Orchestra in 2020, and Tip the Ivy, a semi-staged opera premiering in Graz in February 2022. Self currently lives in Berlin.
Laura Lotti is a researcher and writer investigating emerging dynamics in web3, with a focus on the affordances of blockchain to power alternative cultural economies. She is currently studying the social dimension of community-led protocol governance with Other Internet and she is co-developing Black Swan, a proto-institution for interdisciplinary research and practice.