Abstract

Money. Value. Wealth. Price. Cost. Abstracts of an economic language that persistently but mistakenly appear as indistinguishable from each other. In an era of increasing digitisation and the automation of money systems, these distinctions become even more obscure. Mysterious narratives about disembodied economies threaten to dominate.* The episode PROOF-OF-BURN counters this financial black box and its information asymmetries by demonstrating new modes of organizing mutual trust and material exchange. PROOF-OF-BURN uses the concept of money burning to explore the construction of value and its mediation via cash, digital money and new forms of cryptocurrency. In a series of monetary-technological rituals and artistic interventions in finance, this episode demonstrates how forms of money relate to the systems of labor and natural resources that underpin all economies. Reframing the semantic field of VERMÖGEN, this episode illuminates the interaction between money, trust, value and economic coordination to reflect on our (crypto)economic condition.

*One of the most recent of these narratives concerns the emergence of blockchain-enabled ‘Decentralised Autonomous Organisations’ (DAO), economic entities that apparently ‘exist on the internet’, detached from underlying systems of actual production.