Rethinking the Blockchain Torque
- Submitting institution
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The University of Lancaster
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 306442745
- Type
- T - Other
- DOI
-
-
- Location
- Lancaster
- Brief description of type
- Lancaster University
- Open access status
- -
- Month
- September
- Year
- 2014
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This multi-component output includes a range of original open-access materials addressing reading today and how new blockchain technologies inform distribution and production. Using an ‘expanded publishing’ paradigm through Torque, a collective operating as a publishing house, outputs include the website, performances, essays and books, with contributions from artists, experts from various fields, and interested publics. Torque creates sites where ideas, speculations and innovations within publishing and language come into contact with people's encounters with technologies as they emerge or vanish from view.
Key questions for Torque was how artists might intervene in blockchain development, and what a publishing house could be. Torque encompasses ‘itinerant publishing’, visiting different contexts for their effects on the publishing process: ‘hybrid publishing’, using a diversity of digital and non-digital forms integrated into a contemporary publishing workflow; and ‘post-digital’ publishing, a critical form of hybridity that interrogates perceived exceptionalism around digital tools.
The project has received three £10,000 grants from Arts Council England for exhibitions and publications. Exhibitions were held at Furtherfield Gallery (London), Grundy Art Gallery (Blackpool), and performative installations presented at Transmediale and FACT group shows, reaching over 1000 people. Workshops in Berlin, London, Brussels, Liverpool and Newcastle have involved 75 participants.
A pivotal element of the Torque project has been the book Artists Rethinking the Blockchain, co-edited with Sam Skinner, Ruth Catlow and Marc Garrett of Furtherfield. The book includes an introduction by Jones, cited in reviews in Art Review, we-make-money-not-art, P2P Foundation, and Neural magazine. In its 3rd printed edition and with parts translated into Japanese and French, the book includes contributions from 29 practitioners and thinkers on the blockchain, many newly commissioned for the book. Jones envisaged the book as a ‘future artefact from a time before blockchain changed the world’.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -