Linda Rocco (RCA) - 2020-21 Students
linda.rocc@gmail.com

Enabling Viable Arts Ecologies Responsive to Industry 5.0

The birth of new and emancipatory creator-led economies powered by the blockchain and AI, with the advancement of nanotechnology, quantum computing, and Web 3.0, are some of the innovations promised by the forthcoming Fifth Industrial Revolution.

The aim of this practice-based research is to conceptualise an alternative edifice or proto-field for artists and arts professionals that recognises and values their practices in our STEM-oriented culture – proposing new forms of instituting and organising work that benefit from experimenting with other disciplines and new publics. The prototyping of this new edifice is responsive to the transformations brought by increased automation, new understandings of labour and digitally sophisticated collaborative methodologies. It adopts network thinking to open up spaces for possibilities, suggesting new horizontal economies of exchange and alternative support structures beyond the art establishment.

The prototyping harnesses the creative and organisational potential of Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), particularly NFTs, DAOs (decentralised autonomous organisation) and P2P (peer-to-peer) methodologies to advance new socio-technical scenarios for an inclusive vision of the arts through the curatorial.

This modelling will advance new longitudinal conditions for knowledge exchange, with a view on transdisciplinarity and co-production as necessary added value and resource sharing as an in-built asset. Proposing the overhauling of relations between disciplines to enable and foster conditions for horizontal cross-fertilisation of ideas, conversations, and communities of people and practice.

Primary supervisor: Professor Victoria Walsh, RCA
Secondary supervisor: Professor Chantal Faust, RCA