Month: May 2021

Helen’s awareness of the potential of complementary currencies for environmental, social and economic wellbeing began in 1991 when she joined the Wairarapa Green Dollar Exchange. In 2002 she became a founding member of the Living Economies board and the New Zealand distributor of Margrit Kennedy’s Interest and Inflation Free Money, the first of a growing list of titles now available through the Living Economies online bookstore.

Helen is a keen networker, and her attendance at international conferences on currencies in Germany (2003) and New York (2004) have led to ever-widening contacts with others committed to researching and promoting local and global currency projects. She was project manager for the New Zealand edition of Fleeing Vesuvius, published by Living Economies in August 2011.

Director Sth Auckland Studies and Senior Lecturer at Auckland University.

Billie received her PhD in Art History from the University of Auckland (NZ), and completed post-doctoral research at Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA,UK). She is currently Senior Research Fellow at the University of Auckland Business School and an Affiliated Researcher at MAA. Billie explores Indigenous economies and aesthetics and has collaborated with Māori and Pacific artists, academics and communities towards co-developed research, co-authored publications, co-curated exhibitions, and projects of artistic and economic revitalisation. She has a particular passion for eighteenth-century Māori and Tongan artefacts, and the economic and political objectives their transactions were harnessed to.

Dmitriy is a permaculturist, community activist, systems thinker and a holistic health practitioner who is dedicated to bringing positive change. In the past he has worked as a systems administrator and has a qualification in electronic engineering. He currently lives in Tui community, and is an active member throughout Golden Bay. Since moving to Takaka, Dmitriy became involved with the Golden Bay Hands committee as a technical person to help revive the HANDS exchange systems. Currently Dmitriy works closely with the movement of SEEDS, and is introducing new tools into the local community.

Geert Lovink is a Dutch media theorist, internet critic and author of Uncanny Networks (2002), Dark Fiber (2002), My First Recession (2003), Zero Comments (2007), Networks Without a Cause (2012), Social Media Abyss (2016), Organisation after Social Media (with Ned Rossiter, 2018) and Sad by Design (2019). In 2004 he founded the Institute of Network Cultures at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. His centre organizes conferences, publications and research networks such as Video Vortex (online video), Unlike Us (alternatives in social media), Critical Point of View (Wikipedia), Society of the Query (the culture of search), MoneyLab (internet-based revenue models in the arts). Recent projects deal with digital publishing and the future of art criticism.

I am a senior lecturer in applied theatre. To this role I bring over ten years of experience producing theatre education, youth theatre, community arts and children’s theatre projects in the UK and New Zealand.

My research focuses on the ways in which theatre and the arts can contribute to social justice and well-being. Most of my research is ethnographic and/or arts-based, involving in depth, often collaborative, fieldwork to understand the relationship between examples of practice and the contexts in which they are produced. I am also involved in collaborative creative practice projects exploring issues of environmental and economic justice.

Denise Thwaites is a curator and researcher specialising in contemporary digital arts. Her work interrogates experimental frames of value, especially as they are re-imagined through creative engagements with emergent technologies. 

As Assistant Professor in Digital Arts and Humanities at the University of Canberra, Denise teaches into the Bachelor of Arts and Digital Cultural Heritage.

She has led and co-led curatorial projects for This Is Not Art Festival (Newcastle), New Beginnings Refugee Culture and Arts Festival (Sydney), Firstdraft (Sydney) and Next Wave Festival (Melbourne).

Walter Langelaar is an artist/activist from the Netherlands.
His work in media arts and design questions our digitally networked cultures and infrastructure through artistic critique in varying dimensions such as sculpture, installation, online performance and critical intervention.

Currently, as part of his practice-based PhD research dubbed ‘ꟻunctions ꟻollow ꟻorms’, Walter created the ‘p0.nz/i’ gallery and workshop space for crypto art & design research; a design experiment set up to run as a Distributed Autonomous Organisation (DAO) using non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and other types of crypto assets and tooling as part of its governance structure.

Joshua is an entrepreneur, programmer and educator with a passion for business, technology and social change. He has been running technology businesses for the last dozen years and launched Enspiral in 2010. In 2013 he co-founded Enspiral Dev Academy and has been focused on teaching and accelerated education.

He has been actively leading the exploration of self-management and designing decentralised organising systems at Enspiral for the past seven years and is currently serving as a Catalyst of the Enspiral network, while launching launching a new livelihood pod called Golden Pandas.

Joshua is an active advisor and mentor in the early stage technology and social impact space and has been an active supporter of Conscious Consumers, PledgeMe, Action Station, Loomio and Cobudget in their early days. He is happiest when working with people who relentlessly pursue dreams of a better world.

Jennifer is a Senior Lecturer at School of Engineering and Computer Science. She conducts inter-disciplinary research in partnership with organisations based in New Zealand, the UK, Canada, and Ireland. She regularly publishes on topics that span Design, Software Engineering, and Social Science perspectives. Her research focuses on the human aspects of software development, from investigating ways of enhancing collaborative work on diverse software teams, to the user experience design of software products.

Based out of Korea and New Zealand Songyi is an entrepreneur and collective builder, using technology for impact. She is passionate about building a globally collaborative economy with purpose-driven entrepreneurs and emerging technologies. In 2013 she co-founded a Silicon Valley startup that empowered the world’s unbanked population by providing access to Bitcoin through a decentralized SMS network.

She is using her global experience (Korea, USA, Germany, Thailand, and New Zealand) to connect leaders and organisations and create a positive impact in the world. She helps individuals and organisations change the way they innovate through the tools of self-management, the future of entrepreneurship, and new collaboration tools.

Billy Rennekamp is an artist, Software developer and co-founder of Bin Studio, a multidisciplinary research, design and development studio based in Berlin, DE. He works on a variety of projects including Cosmos/Tendermint, Clovers Network, ENS Nifty, Doneth and MemeLordz. He is the Cosmo Network founder.

He recently received an ECF grant to continue work on Clovers Network, a game that rewards the creation of scarce art. He has recently finished as a technologist in resident at Pioneer Works in New York City.

Ko Kevin Shedlock (nee Walker) toku ingoa
Ko te whare tapu o Ngapuhi raua ko Ngati Porou me ki Whakatohea te iwi
Ko Ngati Hau, Te Kapotai, Ngati Wai raua ko Te Aitanga a Hauiti nga haapu
Mauri ora!!

My research involves working with indigenous communities to better understand technology from within an indigenous lens. I am particularly interested in virtual reality as a technology that delivers perceived awareness connections and embodied sensory connections within an indigenous socio technical system (iSTS). This involves:

• Organizing the construction of the IT artifact ex-ante/ex-post.
• Working with indigenous data filters in an immersive, interactive and intelligent setting.
• Being spatially located inside technology such as virtual reality.

I am a Lecturer and Coordinator of Music Technology and Director of Research at the School of Music of the University of Auckland. Prior to that, I worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Augmented Instruments Laboratory at Queen Mary University of London and at the Interaction Lab of the University of Trento. I have a PhD in Human-Computer Interaction applied to Music Technology and a MSc in Computer Science.

My research is aimed at critically assessing the impact of technology on music creation, learning, and consumption and at designing alternative futures by drawing inspiration from methodologies and epistemologies from different disciplines, among which Human-Computer Interaction, Sociology, and Philosophy.

Eric Barry Drasin is a research-based artist exploring the relationship between art and systems of value. Through emerging blockchain technologies, his current research explores digital or “distributed” processes, objects, and organizations and that problematize and reprogram fundamental assumptions about how value is constructed and disseminated.

Using contracts and legal frameworks as platform for enacting collectivity, cooperation and utopian absurdity is injected into systems designed to consolidate power. One of the vehicles for this is the technology startup.  In this way, by embodying the technology startup and realizing it as a sculptural art object, the work serves to “disrupt” the forces of disruption and subvert the biases of digital capitalism.

Class War On The Dance Floor is the solo project of Marika Pratley. A tapestry of vaporwave, chiptunes, ambient lo-fi, retro synthwave and hip hop, she is inspired by artists from Wendy Carlos to Peaches, Eno to Merzbow, and everything else in between. She has performed several events and festivals in Aotearoa, including Newtown Festival 2021, Auckland Pride 2020, and opening for Brooke Candy in 2019. Her track Yasmeen was selected for the Synthstrom Audible Release compilation, celebrating  NZ’s leading electronic music invention the Deluge. 

Marika has scored multiple award-winning productions and  also performs in Moody V and The Menstrual Cycle and Heleyni.

This year she will be releasing Class War On The Dance Floor debut album, and is currently completing a commission at Pyramid Club and remix of Eyeliner for the National Library digital archiving project. 

Marikapratley.bandcamp.com

Sound cloud.com/marikapratley 

IG @classwaronthedancefloor 

Robert Kirkby is a Senior Lecturer of Macroeconomics at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. He is presently the Undergraduate Program Director for the School of Economics and Finance. His main research focus is the relation between Macroeconomics and Inequality.

In the New Zealand context he has looked at modelling recessions and booms, at characterizing the Fiscal behaviour of New Zealand Governments, at how policymakers can understand uncertainty, and at the effects of mortgage lending restrictions on housing and the spillovers to the economy.

More broadly his research includes topics such as money & inflation, cryptocurrencies, computational theory, the effects of taxation on the economy and inequality, and the relation between trends in macroeconomics and inequality. He is a lead-developer on the VFI toolkit for Matlab; vfitoolkit.com.

Hi my name is Mohini O. and in #cryptoart my tag handle is OoakosiMo. I am an artist by passion since as far back in childhood as I remember and a video editor by profession since 2004 but just started cryptoart in Feb 2020.

Here is my work portfolio: https://mohini.artstation.com/

So far have enjoyed creating and collecting digital art through various blockchains, ones that I can afford, whenever I get some art sales myself.

#trashLord maker of imaginary oracles through composition narratives. I love using out takes or scrapped versions, there is some kind of organic flow to them, very sincere, so I call it #trashart and or #junkart I guess it is in a digital sense for me at the moment.

I have been exploring several minting platforms across various blockchains and you can check out my store links and body of works over here: https://mohini.neocities.org/cryptoartlinks.html

I’m just learning html for now and tried to curate some of my selected works from last year (2020) here: https://mohini.neocities.org/cryptoart.html

here are my ethereum collected and created art https://tryshowtime.com/ooakosimo

neurocolor is a visual artist who creates digital, traditional and hybrid artworks through the use of highly saturated colors. His inspiration comes from Vaporwave, glitch art and abstract painting.

neurocolor is a persona and a state of mind; a psychedelic stream of experimentation and serendipity through the use of vibrant colors. From oil painting to generative computer art and from mysticism to pop motifs, his work is constantly seeking new ways to challenge visual status quo

I’m Ben Nolan, a developer from Wellington, New Zealand. I’m a javascript developer, interested in decentralization, virtual reality and multi user spaces. I’ve lived in New Zealand for the last ten years, but prior to that I worked in Germany for a year.

Cryptovoxels started as a project to build a metaverse (ala Snowcrash or Ready Player One) on the web. It followed on from the authors earlier work on SceneVR and A-FrameVR. Upon realising the potential of a virtual world were land ownership was recorded on the Ethereum blockchain (using an ERC721 token), the author started full speed at building a user-editable world that doesn’t require programming knowledge.

The project was first released behind a secret beta key in May 2018. The first land sales were made to the authors friends and advisors and June 2018, and then to early adopters through the OpenSea cryptocollectibles marketplace. Betakey was removed and land sales were opened up to all comers in July 2018.

Programme Leader Technology @ Whitecliffe

Roman is an artist and full-stack developer with a long-standing involvement in the arts and culture sector in Aotearoa.
His interdisciplinary research interests focus on the relationships between conceptual art and the computational from a Māori perspective.
Roman holds a Doctorate in Fine Art from Auckland University’s Elam School of Fine Arts and joins Whitecliffe looking to continue his contribution through enriching connections between creativity and tech.

My BSc degree is in Mathematics, where I specialized in theoretical Computer Science, and my PhD degree is in Computer Science. My PhD thesis was on automated theorem-proving (ATP), a hard and important area within logic and artificial intelligence. After my PhD I was a Lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Essex, moving from there to being a Lecturer in Computer Science at QMW (formerly QMC) in the University of London. I moved to Waikato in January 1994 and am currently a Professor in Software Engineering.

I have recently started work on a project funded by Science for Technological Innovation (SfTI) to do with storing taonga and other cultural artefacts in a secure and trusted way via blockchain. I am also involved in BRONZA (Blockchain Researchers of New Zealand Aotearoa) and chaired the first meeting of this group. I am also working with colleagues in Data61 in Sydney on blockchain-related research, and colleagues at the HASLab in Minho on the interface between UX and security.

Te Rarawa / Ngāpuhi, Founding Director / Kaituitui Āhau

Kaye-Maree Dunn has a strong commitment to whānau (extended family), hapū (sub-tribe), iwi (tribe), tech innovation and self-development. She excels in team environments where she can make an active contribution to achieving team goals. Working in the social enterprise, community development, housing, tourism, legal and health sectors has assisted her in building her companies Making Everything Achievable (MEA) and genealogy and archival platform Āhau.

Alex is an Associate Professor in the Department of Commercial Law and a Reseach Fellow at the UCL Centre for Blockchain Technologies. She teaches a wide range of commercial law subjects. Her primary areas of research and publication are on blockchain technology, in particular, DAOs (decentralised autonomous organisations) the regulation of cryptocurrencies and legal issues surrounding smart contracts. For more background see here. Alex’s legacy areas of research and publication are consumer law and intellectual property law (in particular copyright law).

Passionate about all things decentralised / blockchain for common good. Founder of TheDAO.agency (a DAO based out of New Zealand providing a range of services in the Blockchain, decentralised governance and Decentralised Autonomous Organisation space) and one of the founding members of the Metacartel Venture DAO. Some of my career highlights include: running the first University course in the world on DAOs, bringing Vitalik Buterin and Andreas Antonopoulos over to NZ, co-founding BlockchainLabs, pollinator for the DAOStack Genesis DAO, Executive Director of BlockchainNZ, featured in Decentralized Thriving (https://daostack.io/ebook), presenting at a select committee hearing for the NZ government, co-authoring “New Zealand: Unlocking Blockchain’s Potential”, being part of the SingularityU New Zealand local training faculty and presenting at over 40 conferences in 6 countries on decentralisation topics.