Photo: Geraldine Juarez / ‘Tanda Foundation’ installation

The ‘Alternative Economy Cultures’ (alt.econ.cult) programme brings together leading international and Finnish thinkers, cultural practitioners and activists, to present alternative economic visions during Pixelache Festival: Friday 3rd April & Sunday 5th April.

The full 1-day seminar on Friday, and related workshop about 'peer-fundraising' on Sunday afternoon, has been initiated and organised by artist-researcher Andrew Gryf Paterson (Medialab TaiK), in cooperation with Roope Mokka of Demos Helsinki, and aims to offer a new strand to the Pixelache Network discourse.

On the Friday morning, veteran-activist Michael Albert of ZCom (US) will present his theory of 'Participatory Economics (Parecon)', and writer-researcher Michel Bauwens of P2P Foundation (BE/TH) will speak about his vision of 'Peer-to-Peer Economics and the Revolution in Values'. Both are in Finland thanks to individual pledges of enthusiasts and donations from like-minded organisations. This session will be chaired by Marita Muukkonen & Ivor Stodolsky of Perpetuum Mobile.

The afternoon session will be chaired by Roope Mokka. To start, the local heritage keynote by Ruralia Institute research director Tapani Köppä (FI) will remark on village cooperation in Finland.

Researching the field, politically-engaged artist Oliver Ressler (AT) speaks of his experience interviewing utopians, while philosopher Tere Vadén (FI) reflects upon the sustainability of open source projects. Network theorist Felix Stalder (AT) and Sara Sajjad of Piratbyrån (SE) will light IP sparks to speak about remix and copy economies 'in the swarm' online.

Project-examples of applied action and design follow. Wojtek Mejor (PL) shares with us the free cultural world of events in Warsaw and techniques for knowing whats going on, where. Lead negotiator Saija-Riitta Sadeoja of Porkkanamafia (FI) will tell the story of a mob, developing into an institution committed to responsible-business activism, and performance artist Eero Yli-Vakkuri of Uuva Project (FI) will report on 1 year of promoting and using the Uuva currency to re-numerate under- or unpaid cultural work.

The last two presentations will cover similar ground, but from two very different cultural contexts:
Geraldine Juarez of Tanda Foundation (MX) will present her 'TandaTanda' events, artefacts and techniques, materialising the donation of funds online for cultural project grants. Local co-founder Kristoffer Lawson of Scred (FI) will also explain and compare his peer-funding online system which emerged from organising the renowned Alternative Party events.

Bridging the gap between presentations, reflections and things-to-be-done, Geraldine Juarez (MX) will lead a workshop about peer-fundraising on Sunday 5th April, hosted at Demos Helsinki office.

This discussion-based workshop event will also reflect on the following experiment: An online donation system has been set up by partner organisation Demos Helsinki, with the kind support of Suomen Verkkomaksut, and implemented by Nordkapp. Explore the crowd-sourcing phenomena seen in Obama's election campaign. Can it be applied to support cultural events in Finland? More information coming to this blog soon!

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Please register/sign up for seminar by 31st March to guarentee a seat!

Send email to alt.econ.cult [-at-] pixelache.ac
(choose subject-line: friday morning -or- friday morning + afternoon)

Free entry!
Festival pass not needed, but volunteer contributions of 5/10/20/30€ welcome.

For more details, see here:
http://2009.pixelache.ac/festival/programme/alternative-economy-cultures/

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