Beyond Cultures of Ownership 2023 Recap

RadicalxChange Foundation and Serpentine Arts Technologies recently hosted Beyond Cultures of Ownership: Emerging Strategies for Interdependence, a day-long exploration of how art and culture offer powerful vectors for creatively reimagining, and experimentally reconfiguring, institutions of ownership. To continue this exploration we are also announcing an Open Call for ‘Concept Proposals’/ ‘Position Papers’ that further our understanding of how art and culture can help reconfigure ownership and shape new models for interdependence. Applications are open until Dec. 20.

Why ownership? Current structures of ownership play a critical role in granting the power to dominate, extract, and speculate, which modern societies have typically entrusted the state to try to tame through regulations and taxes. Yet, globally and locally, capital is finding ever more ways of eroding and avoiding those limits – demonstrating the need to trial new models that rebalance our relationships with technology, the planet, and one another.

Why art and culture? By refocusing on art as a relational structure rather than a form of capital – a complex of mutual obligations, rather than a fixed asset – we might unlearn our habits of approaching the world through a speculative lens and develop systems that emphasise interdependence and common stewardship. Specifically, we will develop new protocols for creating and sharing value in artistic and cultural production that can serve as an inspiration for broader societal application.

In this post we will briefly recap the Beyond Cultures of Ownership event and highlight ways to get involved in the larger project on property rights that is beginning to unfold.

Beyond Cultures of Ownership

We tried, to the limits of our abilities, to create a space that brings together many of the different threads and intersections that we think will be necessary to transform the cultural imaginaries and practices of ownership: there were about 120 participants composed roughly evenly of artists, academics, technologists, and civic leaders.

To set context and give people a sense of where we are coming from and what we are after, we first featured several short talks that represent different ways into the larger conversation:

• Matt Prewitt and Victoria Ivanova provided an overview of the larger collaboration that this event is part of.

• Hilary Cottam and Indy Johar (Q&A) discussed the need to shift from a dominion-based property paradigm to one rooted in care.

• Divya Siddarth shared how artificial intelligence challenges traditional concepts of ownership and what to do about it.

• Sam Sivapragasam revealed some of the fundamental shortcomings of property and suggested ways to transcend them.

• Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley cut to the heart of fears and paradoxes surrounding ownership, self-interest and sharing.

• Mathew Lawrence explained why redistributing property is not enough and why we must reimagine it.

• Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst walked through various strategies to help artists and the public gain greater agency over generative AI models.

These then inspired Open Space sessions led by participants, where further context emerged from the diversity of perspectives weaving into the community. There were 34 sessions held in total, on a wide range of topics such as Partial Common Ownership of Art, trauma, AI, self-owning rivers, and even quantum ownership. See the full list of sessions here.

The 34 Open Space sessions held at the Beyond Cultures of Ownership unConference.

This event was about helping a diverse group of people focused on ownership come to see themselves as a community. To continue engaging with this exploration we are also announcing an Open Call for ‘Concept Proposals’/ ‘Position Papers’ that further our understanding of how art and culture can help reconfigure ownership and shape new models for interdependence. Applications are open until Dec. 20.

We are open to all practices and disciplines, and encourage applicants to treat this as an opportunity to build links between a specific aspect of ‘ownership’ or related emerging system, and their areas of expertise/interest. The applicants can pull on theory and/or practice in order to expand the imaginaries of ‘beyond ownership’ conceptually and/or operationally. We encourage applicants to approach the Concept Proposals/Position Papers as collaborative early stage creative R&D. Please feel free to use the materials from the Beyond Cultures of Ownership gathering as a reference point, and when you are ready, here is the link to apply. The deadline is 20 December 2023.

Lastly, this is the start of a larger, long-term project focused on ownership and property systems, in which we are working with Dark Matter Labs, Margaret Levi and her team at Stanford, and many other partners. Moving forward, we hope you will join us in forming collaborations that will help define this community. We’re now planning our next event, which will be March 1-2, 2024 at Preservation Park in Oakland, California. We look forward to sharing more and hopefully seeing you there.