Nov'24 ::: Fau0x Salon, Post-Clock Rationalisations & The Immaculate Misconception @ Bangkok CITYCITY
16/11 Event
FAU0X SALON Card Game & Discussion
Art and theory collective 0xSalon presents an unpredictable experience, harnessing randomness to deliberately destabilise one of the most stilted conversational forms: the panel discussion. For the past few years, 0xSalon has been developing a bespoke discourse card game, FAU0X SALON, which facilitates bizarre conversations—veering wildly between the sublime and the ridiculous—that would otherwise be impossible. An expanded and updated version of the card deck has been re-engineered to act as a chaotic stochastic moderator, shifting agency away from human facilitators and placing faith in chance and dissonance.
Taking the form of a bespoke collection of theory-fiction inspired cards in the style of a tarot deck, FAU0X SALON allows participants to role-play the initiation and steering of post-disciplinary conversations from a variety of perspectives beyond their own opinions and beliefs. FAU0X SALON proposes itself as a narrative device for the hypothetical exploration of emergent consensus and dissensus, agreement and conflict, concerning both the sacred and the profane. By operating as an anticipatory mechanism for the simulation of possible scenarios, FAU0X SALON allows participants to think, feel, and act through strategies and solutions without the burden of connecting hypotheses to their lived realities and identities. We invite you to take a ride in our dissonance engine sometime.
https://0xsalon.pubpub.org/fau0xsalon
22/11 Event
POST-CLOCK RATIONALISATIONS talk & THE IMMACULATE MISCONCEPTION interactive game
Drawing upon recent publications and an upcoming book, Wassim Z. Alsindi connects several strands of long-standing research into network communities in POST-CLOCK RATIONALISATIONS: synthetic temporalities; ideologies of scarcity; and relationships between prophecy, capital, and technology.
As Bitcoin surpasses previous price records and re-enters mainstream consciousness following several wilderness years, the twelve-year-old cryptocurrency appears to have “arrived” in the eyes of the market. The value proposition of an ungoverned, uncensorable digital means of value transfer is clear for all to see…but can humanity and Earth afford the thermodynamic price tag? For as long as there has been financial capital, risk and speculation have orbited, manipulated and harvested from it. As narrative feedback machines, simultaneously reading and rewriting realities, markets exist as a distributed conversation amongst speculators driven by profit motives and an appetite for divination and prophecy. Despite the ostensible ‘neutrality’ afforded by technology advances, recognisable human characteristics and archetypes appear again and again. With their dreams of new ‘Network State’ empires, resource extraction, and colonial domination, today’s tech overlords are the descendants of Europe’s mediaeval Crusaders: well-financed, zealous fanatics remaking the world in the name of their greater good. Through a psycho-political reading of scarcity, chauvinism, and colonialism, The Chain Mail Gaze connects Crusader ideologues’ desire for blood, land, and booty, to emerging ‘frontiers’ mediated by contemporary technologies.
THE IMMACULATE MISCONCEPTION is an interactive storytelling environment inspired by pre-internet gamebooks. Participants make a series of policy decisions over time as Bitcoin proliferates and global sea levels rise: acceleration of the quest for limitless energy, attempts to exile Bitcoin off-planet, conducting an insurrection, or acquiescence to the new machine god. The game interrogates the environmental implications of cryptocurrencies, charting speculative futures that probe tensions between capital and ecology in the contemporary global regime dominated by scarcity economics. The work unfolds as a fictional narrative, where formerly ‘failed’ states make Bitcoin their official currency, as volcano-powered energy makes them the richest nations on Earth, and eco-conscious activists start rising up against mining farms.