This week's conversation ranges over an astonishingly wide range of topics from ways to facilitate interspecies communication through play and ways to play 3-person pacifist chess (and thereby change the world), to the nature of democracy and how the use of quadratic voting on the blockchain to inspire artistic endeavours in north London might be expanded nationally and internationally on the scale of global governance to shift the cultural dominance away from capital hegemony to a more fluid, genuinely inclusive democracy.
All this in conversation with Ruth Catlow. Ruth is co-founder (with Marc Garrett) and co-director (with Charlotte Frost) of Furtherfield, a project based in Finsbury Park in London which organises for inclusivity and equity in art and technology and advocates for their use in imagining and building real social change and positive environmental impact.
Background and Bio:
Furtherfield's mission is to open up the tools and debates of the exclusionary realms of art and technology for collective action for collective good. Ruth and her colleagues invest time and energy in decentralised and distributed p2p practices, fostering new creative collaborations between artists and communities, as well as challenging debates about the role of art and technology in society.
With this, Ruth's work advances critical discussions of emergent technologies and their implications and she has, for example, led the way in terms of understanding what blockchain technologies mean for the arts and beyond. She directs the Furtherfield decentralised arts lab, DECAL and is also key to the development of live action role play (LARP) games for research, partnering with researchers to craft imagined/futuristic scenarios in which a group of players explore a complex socio-digital issue.
Since late 2020, Ruth has been immersed in the massive Interspecies Treaty LARP as part of her participation in the EU Horizon 2020 funded CreaTures project. All participants advance more-than-human justice by playing the game as other species, representing them in Assemblies to discuss and plan an Interspecies Festival that will celebrate the signing of 'an Interspecies Treaty of Cooperation (known as 'The Treaty of Finsbury Park') in 2025.
Ruth is also one of the organisers of the 'Radical Friends' conference in 2022 and co-author/editor of the book that arose from it called 'Radical Friends: Decentralised Autonomous Organisations and the Arts' and co--PI of the Serpentine Galleries Blockchain Lab.
Furtherfield https://www.furtherfield.org
DECAL https://decal.furtherfield.org/
Ruth's website https://ruthcatlow.net/
CultureStake app https://www.furtherfield.org/culturestake/
More on the XDai blockchain https://medium.com/mycrypto/what-is-the-xdai-chain-and-why-should-i-try-it-40f539732fb4
Radical Friends https://torquetorque.net/publications/radical-friends/
Serpentine Galleries Blockchain Lab. https://www.serpentinegalleries.org/whats-on/blockchain-lab/
The Treaty of Finsbury Park https://www.furtherfield.org/the-treaty-of-finsbury-park-2025/
Cade Diehm - paper co-written with Ruth https://newdesigncongress.org/en/pub/finsbury-park-2025
Finsbury Park https://www.parksandgardens.org/places/finsbury-park
PBES Report https://ipbes.net/global-assessment
Accidental Gods 