Deep Salon | Program

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23 FEB

LOOKING AT THE STATE-OF-THE-ART

As a form of digital decentralization and a support for autonomy outside established channels of power, what can Web3 offer artists and art institutions looking for new organizing possibilities? This panel lays out the basics of deploying Web3 to improve the art market – or even to create alternative frameworks entirely – and the problems emerging from its usage, including riskier and more speculative profit-chasing.‍

23 MAR

HOW WEB3 HAS CHANGED ART COLLECTING

Can everyone be an art collector? What are the similarities and differences between digital and material collecting, and what are their respective advantages and disadvantages? This talk centers on the impact of participatory engagement on the success of NFT projects, as well as the effects of on-chain art and marketplaces on the culture and economy of collecting.

27 APR

DECOLONIZING KNOWLEDGE IN WEB3

Is it possible to use blockchain as part of an engaged decolonial practice? Moreover, how can different art institutions and communities make the most of Web3 without getting caught up in reproducing its western-capitalist dynamics? This session aims at enlarging the analysis of the Web3 agenda as an economic structure, a sphere of knowledge, and a mode of governance and hypothesizing solutions to free Web3 from hypercapitalism’s dominant paradigm. RSVP on Eventbrite.

25 MAY

WEB3 AND ACTIVISM

As computing software has become cheaper, faster, and easier to use, can artists and activists turn to Web3 for support in dangerous social environments? Simultaneously, in what regards do the technology’s underlying contradictions threaten these very same actors? This talk takes up digital decentralization as a political act and the potential of private, peer-to-peer, and censorship-resistant technologies as revolutionary tools. RSVP on Eventbrite.

22 JUN

CRYPTOECONOMICS AND ARTISTIC PRACTICE

How are crypto economics and art connected? Do artistic approaches to Bitcoin, blockchain, and other forms of tokenization hold the potential to decentralize such financial systems? Deep Salon’s closing discussion asks how these open-source technologies can be used conceptually or in practice to rearticulate the questions that bedevil contemporary art production.

Deep Salon is a five-panel series examining the intersections of Web3, art, and modern social challenges and imagining the spaces of artistic possibility that might emerge at these junctures. The discussions, hosted by TZ Connect and curated by the art magazine Spike, will bring together an array of experts to ask how we can better use Web3; how art reflects the challenges of the digital world; how blockchain can be decolonized or could worsen existing forms of domination; how decentralization can structure a different kind of art economy; and how NFTs are changing the terms of collecting. Deep Salon will take place in Berlin from February to June, on either the last or second-to-last Thursday of each month.