David Paredes

El Pastor 2021 13’17 David Paredes Ecosistema Más Arte Más Acción

El Pastor representa el arquetipo de la vida en el campo. En todas las instancias, su figura está presente tanto en el mundo real como en el digital. Este video realizado por David Paredes cuenta la historia de un pastor quien navega por diferentes elementos simbólicos del campo como los toros y las vacas, que en este caso representan un desespero. Esa multiplicidad simbólica de las piezas que componen este video, aluden a formas de relacionarnos con la naturaleza y muestra esa infinita fuente de sentido.

Dayra

Dayra 2022 2’29 The Question of Funding

El sistema de Dayra se basa en círculos (sociales) y circulación. Estos círculos son círculos de confianza dentro de las comunidades, donde el modelo económico facilita el intercambio dentro y entre los círculos de confianza. El modelo se expande en un sistema económico gobernado por la comunidad que involucra a diversos sectores de economías simbióticas.

Comienza con valor cero y se enfoca en la abundancia de recursos y conocimientos dentro de una comunidad.

El modelo de Dayra pretende asegurar una economía resistente que las sociedades sean capaces de nutrir por sí mismas.

DIGITAL FARM

This section invites Colombian artists working or discussing the development of economies in rural contexts to reflect on barter systems—and how these systems have been co-opted by digital environments. By engaging with other lumbung members, artists, thinkers, and cultural agents, both from Colombia and from other rural places, distant from the Latin American experience, this curatorial research and artistic production will explore the necessity of strengthening local economies. Departing from some lumbung members’ journey through documenta, it investigates the relationships between economy and artistic practices.

Usually, the potential amount of circulation of an artwork produced on the blockchain is associated to its capacity of being massively capitalized by digital communities. However, discussions about the emancipatory potential of blockchain as a tool for a distribution of resources that does not rely on national or globalised economic dynamics are only just emerging. This question also reflects on the accessibility of rural workers to land ownership and explores the paradigms of distribution that connect in many ways with other members of the lumbung.

On crypto revolutions and solidarity economies

Before addressing how cryptocurrencies or blockchains engage with contemporary artistic practices, it’s paramount to understand how their use can boost processes of economic emancipation—or not. Additionally, we must discuss the role currencies play in capitalist economic circuits for individual profit, as well as in the economic circuits of solidarity economies. We shall also discuss the intersection of both circuits—scenarios where profits resulting from solidarity economics can end up absorbed by for-profit enterprises, and profits resulting from capitalist economies can be accumulated in solidarity economy funds. Finally, we must address how to rearrange economic flows that are nourished by actors of the solidarity economy as to move forward the economic emancipation and bolster the sovereignty of descentralized territories foregrounded by rural dynamics.

First, let’s think about the concept of value. The production of value demands labor and means of production. Throughout history, different systems of value production have appeared: communal, enslaving, servile, capitalist, socialist, communist, among others. In all of them, the produced value materializes as use value through means of consumption (goods and services) and means of production (raw materials, machines, tools, knowledge, etc.) that serve different needs and uses.

The circulation of produced value demands mediums of exchange. To expand this reflection, it is important to mention Brazilian thinker Euclides André Mance’s book A Network Revolution (1998, 50-89). Mance explains the development of different systems of exchange that are, to varying degrees, tied to diverse methods of obtaining economic resources:

a) Donating (giving and receiving), looking at the needs and capacities of each person.

b) Bartering (trocar and trocar), looking at the exchange value of the products.

c) Trading (buying and selling), looking at the monetary value that is offered or received in the exchange of products.

[1] La liberación económica es una teoría pensada desde América Latina como una forma de crear formas de circulación de materias primas, bienes y servicios sin tener que utilizar dinero nacional o monedas internacionales.

In today’s market, trade prevails as the most widely used form of circulation; the means of exchange, products, and money, become commodities, and the method of obtaining them is to buy and sell, exchanging products for money or money for products. Similarly, and on a more abstract level, in the arts, the value of the work is determined by various factors including market speculation, social and institutional validation, its historical significance, its contribution to the field, and its cost of production. The commodification of art has become the focus of attention because of the promises of the international system of art collection, exhibition, and distribution. Artists are forced to produce and seek economic validation in circuits that are often not in accordance with their discourse.

However, there is a growing interest in promoting spaces that are not subject to the commercial dynamics of the big cities, and that have been able to use bartering as the main exchange system. There is an interest in projects that have been able to deepen their discourse more coherently in rural environments and that have explored models of donation and barter. Rurality is shown in this experience as a space of laboratory and community exploration in which works of art can connect with the immediate context and respond, through collective and collaborative processes, to needs that people in their immediate environment are having, through an exchange of signs, images and concepts that are articulated to generate senses of value similar to flows of money or productive capital. Art allows the resignification of those rural economies. Art is proposing other types of exchange dynamics that promote and celebrate rural economic alternatives.

Alternative economic dynamics can result in the economic liberation of goods and services that are subject to international commercial speculation and that inflate their original value. These exercises of economic liberation can occur as long as the community where they take place accepts the new conditions of exchange; for this, there must be consensus on the means of value representation (currencies, cryptocurrencies, credit registry or others) and formalized agreements (as in the case of crypto are the blockchain protocols) that regulate this exchange.

Exchanging the product by means of value representation, under socially agreed rules, allows to release both the economic value invested in the process of production and circulation of the product and the surplus-value or surplus generated by productive labor. It is also objectified in the product, to then be able to invest again such value in the process of its simple or expanded reproduction, or to use it for another purpose.

Now, allow us to think about the current relationship between solidarity economies and the economic circuits of capital.

Although there are many communities around the world that practice solidarity economies, today they are still subordinated to the logics of capitalist economies. "However, in the economic circuits of productive, commercial and financial capital, most of the value produced by the actors of the solidarity economy throughout the world is accumulated. This is because solidarity producers and consumers continue to depend, to a large extent, on the circuits of capital, both for the daily purchase of means of consumption and means of production, and for the marketing and financing of their activities.” [2]

In these activities, the values of solidarity economy actors migrate towards the capital circuit of macro-economies and monopolies, in flows that result in the realisation of profits in processes of the extended reproduction of capital. Therefore, there is no point in using social currencies or cryptocurrencies to mediate economic exchanges, if the value flows of the solidarity economy continue to be captured by the realisation of profits in the economic circuits of capital, with or without the use of these currencies. It would be idealistic to think that solidarity economies, today, can be completely independent of neoliberalism. However, this does not mean that they are not a valuable tool for rethinking current economic dynamics and proposing models that reduce artificial price inflation, labor precarization, and land exploitation.

On the other hand, with the organisation of solidarity economic circuits, a part of the values that were previously realised as profits by productive, commercial and financial capital can be accumulated in solidarity economy funds. And it is for the purpose of realising economic liberation - with the use of the monetary values of these funds to develop the productive and circulating forces of the solidarity economy, thus this project reviews and questions the ways in which the use of social currencies and blockchain-based value tokens can play a strategic role.

[2] André Mande, Euclides (1998). Revolución de las Redes.

At this point, we can touch base on cryptocurrencies and blockchains, as well as their implementation in community art processes.

The ecosystem of virtual currencies, as well as works programmed through decentralised processes and their underlying technologies grew overwhelmingly during the rise of the COVID pandemic; making that conjuncture a wave of institutional speculation and global production that reproduce dynamics of unbridled enrichment, as well as proposals that critique and suggest alternatives.

Sustainable development, promoted by social entrepreneurship, is driven and transformed to the extent of the rapid convergence of information technologies. On the other hand, disruptive technologies such as blockchain-based cryptocurrencies could become transformational tools around citizen behaviour related to social good issues. In this sense, the convergence of social currencies with virtual currencies represents a significant opportunity to take advantage of the potential of both and generate a synergy whose result will impact the quality of life of citizens. These can be powerful tools to help achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) proposed by the United Nations as they can act as enablers or drivers to stimulate local economic development, cooperation between small businesses, access and promotion of educational, social and environmental projects, while favouring innovation and entrepreneurship.

[3] Sustainable Development Goals

We are interested in the proposals of the lumbung—which as a collective bases its artistic production on questions of exchange, economy and distribution of resources within its community—as they formally structure a welfare model oriented that alignes with the objectives of sustainable development and is supported by new technologies.

Some of the lumbung members discuss and use their artistic and transdisciplinary practices to connect art and economy. Such is the case of The Question of Funding, a Palestinian collective invited on this occasion to share in Kasselsus reflections on the way in which, in Ramallah, products and services circulate and on the role of social currencies in that community.

Circular Economies and Autonomous Decentralized Organizations

When a local community organizes itself and channels its income back to the community through a Collective Fund, it opens the path to activities that could only be possible through the collectivity. Therefore, by accumulating the surplus profits from a certain economic activity, rises an alternative for the production, distribution and financing of goods that meet the community’s needs. Thus, the funds allow for products to circulate in the community under collectively agreed upon prices, which lack the inflation characteristic of traditional markets.

"Equity can be analyzed both from a territorial and a social point of view. Without a doubt, the territorial compensation systems in place represent an important step forward in terms of territorial redistribution. The redistributive effects from a social point of view are also important, particularly given that a large part of social expenses are among the main decentralized competencies. Nevertheless, the most relevant thing would be to verify whether decentralization has generated a sustainable trend to continue reducing both territorial and social differences or whether these differences are increasing again." Ivon Font, Decentralization in Latin America: Theory and Practice, ECLAC - Public Management Series N 12, p. 21.

The viability of solidarity-based economic production is achieved through its implementation, which must be socialized, corrected and continued. Only in practice is it possible to understand how to ensure fairer bartering and better comprehend, within each context, the value of consumption of products or services.

Decentralized Autonomous Organizations were created through different virtual platforms in order to find, within the gaps of economic systems, communities that understand equity and redistribution. Now they are spaces recognized for producing incalculable amounts of money from the commercialization of online digital products. Their structure has been read as a decentralized system in virtual communities particularly drawn to video games and digital commerce platforms that serve the needs of specific communities.

Types of consumption

Value formation is closely related to the types and levels of consumption in a community.

Economic dynamics are measured through consumption levels. Distinguishing these types of consumption, so common in the daily lives of most people on the planet, serves to better understand how and to what ends resources and efforts, both personal and institutional, are being focused. Accordingly, we return to the fundamental levels of consumption in relation to solidarity economies, as proposed by André Mande (1998, 166):

a) Alienating consumption is massively practiced in today's capitalist society by a portion of the population that seeks in commodities given values linked by advertising and fashion. Desires, longings, anxieties, fears and needs are semiotically modeled in such a way that the consumption of certain products and certain brands are considered as the best option to achieve happiness and human fulfillment.

b) Another part of society, meanwhile, practices compulsory consumption. These are the impoverished and marginalized, the under-employed, the unemployed who do not have the resources to consume luxury products or famous and expensive brands. Compelled by necessity, they seek to maximize the consumption power of the few resources they have. In the most dramatic cases, they rummage through garbage cans in urban centers in search of food scraps or coats to satisfy their needs. The economically disadvantaged in turn "stretch their wages" looking to buy what is essential and cheaper, prioritizing more on the quantity of products that can be purchased with the same amount of money than on their actual quality. In the slightly higher level, on the other hand, consumers always play with the criteria of quantity and quality, always considering the same amount of resources they have available to make their purchases. All of them, however, regard alienating consumption as their ideal of consumption, and if they could, they would buy products considered as elite products, seeking to stand out socially.

c) In the case of consumption as mediation, it derives from the needs that arise within a community. This type of consumption prioritizes basic needs over elements that may come from the influence of the media. The practice of this consumption requires the elaboration of evaluation criteria from which the objects are selected-within the possibilities of consumption of each one-with the aim of contributing to the specific needs of a person and its design aims at the preservation of family ecosystems. When society is in the midst of a crisis, this can become solidarity consumption, aimed at contributing socially to the well-being of the whole community.

d) Solidarity consumption occurs when, at facing the choice of what to consume, we not only consider our personal welfare, but also the collective one. It implies understanding that production is fulfilled in consumption and that this has an impact on the entire ecosystem and on society. In other words, consumption choices have an impact on creating or sustaining productive employment in a given society (when consuming products made within that society), as well as on the preservation of its ecosystems (when consuming products from companies that recycle materials, combat pollution, etc.). These are choices that seek to promote the collective well-being of a community's population, its country, and its planet. However, consumption choices can also lead to the opposite effect and promote the erosion of the territory and its population.

Lumbung Economies and the Importance of Distribution

At the heart of documenta fifteen lie economic experiments. Several working groups emerged to ask what concrete practices enable the construction of a collective economy of the arts, anchored in the local and based on lumbung values such as humor, generosity, independence, transparency, sufficiency, and regeneration. Its goal is to re-imagine a live that stems from the well-being of the community and its long-term sustainability by building a long-term aggregate, a granary of collective resources that are shared to enhance the sustainability of artist collectives and their ecosystems around the world.

Since October 2020, the 14 members of lumbung and the Artist Team have come together in a working group called the lumbung Economy. Here, they discussed what a long-term lumbung economy would look like, based on their shared values. Out of these broader discussions, several working groups have emerged: lumbung Kios, lumbung Gallery, lumbung Land, and lumbung Currency.

They act as concrete mechanisms to generate unrestricted resources for longer-term lumbung building or, in other words, to transfer money from the classical exhibition economy to the commons-based lumbung economy.

lumbung Currency Working Group

lumbung Currency is a working group composed of members of documenta fifteen and some of its known stakeholders that seeks to strengthen and connect the various community currencies and enhance the conversation around the importance of solidification in independent economies related to care for the earth. Core members that have been part of this discussion are the cryptocurrencies BeeCoin (ZK/U - Center for Art and Urbanistics), Cheesecoin (INLAND), Dayra (The Question of Financing), and Jalar (Gudskul).

The community currencies have allowed lumbung members to develop their own system of economic exchange in which the community decides the value and the exchange is based on direct needs and values. Several learning sessions were organized in the years leading up to the documenta, including dialogues with the nonprofit organization Grassroots Economics, which has already successfully developed community currencies in Kenya, as well as with Paul Seidler and Steph Holl-Trieu, who have jointly developed the Digital Autonomous Organization (DAO) for BeeCoin, the art project of lumbung member ZK/U - Center for Arts and Urbanistics

Dayra (The Question of Funding)

Dayra is an economic model from lumbung member The Question of Funding that uses blockchain technology to circulate community economic value. The model is based on the premise that, while individuals, local businesses, and organizations might lack financial resources, they can still offer material, physical or intellectual resources. The currency thus enables the creation of value for the common good through the exchange and use of these non-monetary resources.

This explains the name Dayra, which means "circle" and "circling" in Arabic. In this way, Dayra not only circumvents traditional, often restrictive financing models, but ensures a resilient supplementary economy that crisis-affected communities can draw upon. This video explains how the Dayra currency works with an example.

dayra.net

BeeCoin (ZK/U - Center for Arts and Urbanism)

BeeDAO is an organization of human and non-human actors, created by ZKu for documenta fifteen, that promotes cross-species democracy, wealth exchange and knowledge creation. The organization's goal is to ensure and improve the welfare of bees worldwide. Based on web3 technologies and sensor kits that monitor key life indicators of more than 15 hives in Kassel, the organization makes decisions at regular assembly meetings.

Operating as a Distributed Autonomous Organization (DAO), BeeDAO is a prototypical experiment, demonstrating the potential of shared work between human and non-human agents. Bees and humans can join BeeDAO and become beekeepers by donating their data (proof of life) or obtaining an NFT membership. They can appoint delegates to represent their interests or submit proposals that will improve the lives of bees and help shape the organization, its rituals and cross-species wealth exchange.

beedao.zku-berlin.org

Cheesecoin (INLAND)

Cheesecoin was invented in 2017 in collaboration with artist Hito Steyerl: it is a fictitious currency used to finance a campaign against a Reality TV company that appropriated the name of INLAND's project.

INLAND, located in Campo Grande (Spain), works with pastoralism and cheese production. Based on this local production system, the collective issues Cheesecoins according on the annual amount of cheese produced. In the first stage, Cheesecoin proposes an experimental economy, which transitions from a purely speculative one to a factual one. Cheesecoin is part of a non-linear economy that mimics neighborhood economies, which operate in parallel to capitalist market economies. It sits on a conventional market economy for goods produced by the collective, such as cheese, but it also draws back from traditional gift economies.

inland.org/cheesecoin/

Jalar (Gudskul)

Members of the Temujalar.art platform earn and accumulate digital points called Jalar for their Jalar Collective Wallet. Jalar are generated by contributing resources or activities to the platform. Users can spend them to join workshops and virtual events, or to build a collective space. The Jalar Collective Wallet is similar to documenta fifteen's Collective Fund, mutually governed by the participating collectives.

Temujalar.art was started by Gudskul in 2020, at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, as an online platform for collectives and their artistic ecosystems. It is based on the belief that online platforms enable knowledge sharing across geographical boundaries and time zones. In Indonesian, Temu means "to gather" and Jalar means "to spread".

Temujalar.art is dedicated to artists, collectives, curators, writers, musicians, researchers, teachers, creatives and the art ecosystem in general. The platform wants to help them learn, collect experiences and share knowledge. By experimenting with these sustainable economic models, the lumbung Currency working group is part of a practice that aims to continue and be effective beyond the 100 days of documenta fifteen.

temujalar.art/

Lumbung Land Working Group

Land is one of the most fundamental approaches to lumbung economics. It is a space where a community has agency, can govern resources collectively, and build a lumbung value-based economy and independent artistic practice. However, many lumbung members and lumbung artists face issues such as land monopolization, climate injustice, or lack of resources to acquire land, which undermines their sustainability and autonomous artistic practices. Others work with land to later restitute it and question how to recreate collective imaginaries around the territory.

Seeking holistic models for land to be cultivated, collectively owned, or to thrive from human and non-human perspectives, the lumbung Land working group is experimenting with models of land development that combine culture, agriculture, and ecology. In addition, they are developing ways for members to collectively "invest" in specific land development projects. The group defines the return and value that comes from the land. Next to the land investment group in 2021, a discursive working group lumbung Land emerged from the discussions.

Land, soil, collective governance, the memory of lost or recovered land, and (urban) gardening are common themes in many artistic works shown at documenta fifteen. The projects discuss how cultural production can help reimagine the relationship to land: How can experiments contribute to developing new utopias that deconstruct those imagined by modernists? Could indigenous poetry, images, and songs be the key to an imaginary around land that is non-extractivist and based on the agency of humans and non-humans living on the land?

A new rural agenda and the question of land distribution

The New Rural Agenda international summit, organized by Jatiwangi Art Factory, was one of the many discussion events within the documenta fifteen around solidarity economy systems. It aimed to encourage local governments and cultural institutions from more than 14 countries to reflect on the importance of land tenure and its distribution. The summit was held as an interdisciplinary space that addresses the relationship with nature, as well as engaging in reflections that do not focus on human beings, but also serve as a means to give voice to other living beings that are part of each territory. Thus, the agendas that were presented are based entirely on the diversity of practices for resources and cultural management that have been carried out in grassroots communities. We consider this event as an alternative to similar conferences that are generally sponsored by large countries or global institutions, in that it emphasized cross-cutting concepts and was designed from the bottom up.

The main objective of the New Rural Agenda is to share how we understand the rural as a concept to talk about the future from two perspectives. Firstly, that of cultural activists working directly in the countryside, who are important figures in the contextualization of cultural resources in their respective areas and in the generation of collective power in dealing with social and ecological issues. Secondly, the rural is no longer regarded as an abstract territory as understood by institutions or representatives who are distant from everyday realities; on the contrary, the rural is approached as a place that needs to be liberated, better understood and newly created.

To bring up the case of Colombia, it is worth visiting the mapping of the transformation of rural environments in the world between 1960 and 2020, carried out by the Labs Rurales project (https://labsrurales.xyz/datos/). In Colombia, the level of rural population has decreased, in six decades, from 53% to 18%. While there are many factors that explain this demographic phenomenon—among them, violence— Labs Rurales reflects on the connection between access to education and artistic and cultural initiatives, and rural development. In many cases, it is independent institutions that support and consolidate work groups and pedagogical strategies for the formation of all types of audiences, while also becoming a platform to create bridges with international discussions that otherwise would hardly have any local impact.

Why are images worth more than land or identity?

As part of this exercise of rethinking the social role of art in resolving questions about forms of economy, it is important to reflect on the evolution of images and to understand this contribution to the visual and plastic arts. The deep structural analogy between art and money is that each represents instances of value that are self-valorizing, insofar as both are social mediations that are anchored in a self-referential or reflexive circuit of valorization: "critical value in art is generated from transactions within its semantic domain, much as in speculative finance (or ‘fictitious capital’, in Marx’s terms) money generates more money through transactions internal to financial markets.” While the valorization of land is speculated through different values such as accessibility, basic services, location and structure, among others, these terms are not defined by the value of the land itself, but by the inference of entities such as developers and financial industries, or by factors such as population growth and the transformation of the market. Both images and land can have a quantifiable and legalizable value in the digital world through contracts minted on the blockchain.

The value of identity, whatever it may be (racial, sexual, gender, cultural, political, artistic, among others), is understood in this research as a characteristic tied to the construction of the biopolitical subject, i.e. it is the form that his approach to social and power relations takes as a function of his daily life. Identity, in the words of Toni Negri, is "the key to the construction of the people, it is its representation: the empirical multiplicity of the population is transformed into identity through the mechanisms of representation - we must take into account here both the political and aesthetic connotations of the term" The commodification of identity makes the artistic discourse lose its validity, since, in its transactional dynamics, it risks of having its symbolic value overshadowed by its commercial one. On the other hand, this commercial value can serve to enhance art’s symbolic value (depending entirely on the interests of the one who carries out the transaction).

Within institutions such as galleries and museums, is not in their commercial value, but in the power of the images for the acceptance and incorporation of policies that facilitate the legitimization of these disputed identities. It is in the political sphere where one can really define or measure whether an image is effective. In the case of documenta fifteen, there is a battle against the image commercialized and exploited by the art circuits for institutional or private benefit. While this discussion continues, many of the aforementioned initiatives take place between the field of the virtual and the concrete, to debate concrete situations of people who have a physical location, while digital media are used as a bridge to dynamize, facilitate and appropriate discourses that are usually far from the cultural or agricultural agenda due to their discursive complexity.

[4] Vischmidt, Marina (2012). Speculation as Mode of Production in Art and Capital. Londres: Universidad de Londres Reina María. [5] Negri, Toni y Hardt, Michael (2002). La multitud contra el Imperio. Buenos aires: CLACSO. p. 160

From discussion to action

At documenta fifteen, a consistent approach was proposed, in which resources were allocated through dialogue and conceptual approaches to art took shape. Spaces for discussion and sharing are one of the fundamental moments that give life to all of the aforementioned projects. From this starting point, the role of the harvest becomes relevant as it documents these dialogues in an unconventional way, by branching out concepts and ideas that were barely approached during the conversations.

From Cuerpos Colectivos, we approach this harvest through the blockchain, and NFTs are the tool that legalize, archive, and allow it to circulate. The NFT is understood as a legal contract that certifies the possession and authenticity of a work, which can be either in digital or physical format and. In addition, it guarantees that if there should be a commercial circulation, the profits can flow back into the author’s virtual wallet or to a Common Fund.

Since art's involvement in the new media and materials stemming from the technical reproducibility characteristic of the 20th century, the control of image rights has become problematic. Among the many paradoxes of the decentralization of archiving and circulation of images, the rights of authorship and ownership have become unruly, and the legal framework that, in principle, governs the circulation of art objects, fails to encompass digital images. In the case of NFTs, such control over the reproduction of digital images is exercised through a contract that is scripted—or as it is known in the crypto world, minted. Minting is a process of coding that encrypts the contract in the work’s informatic dna; no matter how many copies are made, this algorithmic structure remains engraved in it. The process, both simple and complex, is increasingly explored in the art market due to the discursive richness it has generated, especially during the pandemic period, when there was a boom of pieces designed to circulate in virtual media.

The recent relevance of the NFTs comes from their striking market value and the revenues they have brought to some of their authors. However, here we are interested in the socio-digital context, in which new strategies to validate the authorship of a photo or a digital drawing were pursued and that, thanks to massive reception, began to infer in the stock market of art. Indeed, there are already NFT museum projects such as the DAO Museo (https://www.marte247.com/dao-museo) or the Museo de Cryptoarte Cubano (https://cubancryptoart.com/#), which collect and help circulate NFT works of all kinds, from photographs to songs. On the other hand, there are also initiatives that use NFT as a record that tests and systematizes forms of production associated with ecological initiatives, such as the Carbon Coffee Collective project or ZKU BeeDAO, both based in Berlin, but which work with production networks around the world and use NFT and web3 membership strategies to facilitate the improvement of this type of sustainability and interlocal efforts.

A question arises: why should we use these means of archiving and circulation? First, because they respond to the need to connect various rural actors through virtual interactions to facilitate the expansion of their distribution networks and to share strategies for the maintenance and appropriation of cultural processes that only occur interlocally. In addition, they allow collecting and interpreting discussions that serve to build collective memory among new generations. Likewise, this modality of harvesting invites to put discussions into action, an element such as the NFT, preserves in its most basic properties not only a code that serves as a legal basis, but also becomes an article of exchange value.

The fact that we are currently delving into this medium does not mean that later on, in these encounters, there will not appear other languages and codes that we can investigate. NFT as a form of harvesting

NFT as a form of harvest

We arrive here at the work of David Paredes, which is presented in this Digital Farm. Between the surreal and the tropic gothic emerges The Shepherd, an archetypal image that is recurrent in many cultures around the world. For this occasion, we used the work to fragment its discourse through NFT, in order to invigorate discussions around the production of the piece and transform it. In the process of mining, each work carries a message or a critical question about the forms of connectivity in the field, criticism of extractivism, and invites other participants from the crypto world to mine some of the images, to give continuity to the reflections on economy and art.

In this way, the programming structure of the image determines a number of copies that are distributed to those interested in participating in the conversation, through Zoom meetings that will be published on this page or on social networks. Any user can archive Paredes' image, mine it and, if they decide to sell it, 60% of the profits flow back to the artist and 40% to a Common Fund. In this way the NFT allows codifying these transactions.

NFT Collection