Conversations by Julia Kassyk with Ianis Dobrev
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Posted: 26 July 2024
Conversations by Julia Kassyk with Ianis Dobrev
In February, Julia, previously an intern at Baltan, joined the team as a junior project officer. Julia just completed her Master's thesis for which she investigated how western society could transition to post-extractivist* ways of being.
Julia conducted a series of interviews with artists and designers who engage with the concepts related to post-extractivism. In the spirit of sharing knowledge, the conversations will be published on the Baltan website and available for everyone to read.
In the interview below, Julia talked to our former resident and current ARTeCHÓ fellow, Ianis Dobrev. Ianis is an artist, designer and researcher. His artistic and research portfolio contains various projects ranging from experimentation with ceramics to understand mechanical technologies through the materials they are made of, to a think tank that aims to restructure finance through other-than-human intelligence.
During the interview, Ianis explained why he is interested in redesigning finance specifically and why he used the metaphor of Cnidarians in his Cnidarian Economics project. The designer also explained the possibilities of AI and Blockchain technologies in breaking with centralised capitalistic modes of ownership and wealth accumulation.
J: Can you explain what the Cnidarian Economics project is about?
I: The general idea of the project is how we can modify the intelligence of our financial systems. Hence, it expands the notion of intelligence beyond the animal's brain and responds adequately to global warming, biodiversity crisis and other ecological crises.
In my project, I investigate how our intelligence drives our financial system and the money-based economy. An important part of my project is the design of finance and money itself. Since finance is increasingly automatised using artificial intelligence algorithms, I am exploring how finance can be designed to incorporate a non-anthropomorphic view of the world and meaningfully account for the needs of nonhumans. I am using Cnidarians as a prototype for my project.
Why Cnidarians? Cnidarians are fascinating animals. They are cells, atoms, and chemicals. For Cnidarians, the definition of the self within the organism is complex. They are colonial animals built of independent parts that live together and cannot live without each other. Yet, the parts are not considered the same selves. The following questions, among others, guide my project: How do we then distinguish different selves within a Cnidarian? How can we project this way of structuring and understanding a system on the system of global finance? How could the metaphor of cnidarians help us build long-lasting collaborative structures in our financial system globally?
J: Why did you decide to focus on finance?
I: In my Cnidarian Economics project, I want to address climate change, biodiversity crisis and other ecological crises, which we as individual humans cannot fully grasp with our bodies and brains. We cannot comprehend them fully. Satellite images, data and pictures mediate all our ecological thinking. But it is a patchwork thinking. We can only put some of this information together at a time. The global crises can only be meaningfully addressed on a global scale. For humans to think on such a large scale, we need to outsource a medium to organise our knowledge and our actions. Daily, we do it through multiple media, one of which is money.
According to the neoliberal doctrine, money is neutral. It is a medium that enables exchange or trade with as little friction as possible. Money allows the work of for example a philosopher to be translated, or better say compared to the work of a doctor or a farmer. The money allows the doctor to buy food from the farmer and the farmer to pay for the medical treatment. Of course, currently, the exchanges of products and services are not limited to local scale. We trade globally. Thus, money is necessary for us to organise ourselves and address the hyperobject** of the economy.
Neoliberal theory claims that neutrality and ease in the use of money represent our true political freedom of exchanging and growing economically. Further, money is an important factor in a Darwinist socio-economical metaphor: competition will select the fittest, i.e. those who know how to exchange and grow economically.
In reality, it is not true. Money is very political and it incentivises certain dynamics, such as colonial and imperial dynamics and the ecological crisis. It is also abstract. Especially if you think about how much we use our money digitally only. We hardly ever use cash these days.
J: How exactly do you envision translating the Cnidarian intelligence onto the economic system?
I: In your research, you use the concept of ‘imaginary’***, which is also crucial for me. In Cnidarian Economics, I apply the concept of imaginary to how the financial system imagines self-representation of the world, so it can act upon it. Looking at the stock markets, the way supply and demand work and regulate themselves is based on the prices of goods and the expectation for their prices in the future. The financial system recognises only what has a monetary value. Traders will usually speak of externalities when referring to ecological catastrophes, when they are outside of the market, i.e. do not have a defined monetary equivalent. It is a cartesian way of thinking that interprets the world through dualisms. There is us and there is nature. And the market does not care about nature unless you put a monetary value on it. If you do not assign a monetary value to nature in its preserved form, it is worth more when it is destroyed and/or treated as a commodity.
Some say that by not putting a price on nature, we say it is zero. However, when people started expressing the value of nature through money, the idea of ecosystem services, such as carbon credits (permission to emit a certain amount of CO₂), arose. The ecosystem services play by the same rules as capitalism does. If you put a price on nature or a living being, you make it subject to capitalist extraction. You can kill a whale as long as you can afford it. Ecosystem services create new capitalist opportunities for wealth accumulation and profit-making.
In my project, I investigate how we could restructure finance to make it not an ownership-based and not an accumulative system. How do you make something impossible to own?
There is a project in Germany, called Terra0. A group of people bought a forest and tried to put it on a blockchain, so it became a self-owned forest. The forest is an economic agent and it has an economic agency. But no one owns it. Its economic value is not zero, but the forest has its own regulations, tokens, and currency that allow it every once in a while sell its wood for timber and get enough money to pay for the services and the care it needs from humans. But it owns itself in this way.
At this point, it is important to remember a philosophical understanding of what nature is. The subtitle of my project talks about chimerical intelligence. This means we need to combine multiple epistemologies: philosophical, epistemological, chemical, biological, computational, economical etc.
J: Does not there need to be a human choice behind the design of AI to allow such a shift to happen?
I: The idea is that Cnidarian Economics will be a bottom-up project. For example, you design the AI and see where it goes. But we need to give away our agency to the other-than-human. My idea is to reverse the situation compared to how it is now. We need to think about how we can give a voice to forests, animals or ecosystems. At the same time, we need to ask ourselves in which political direction we want to go. But it is only the beginning of the project. I do not have yet all the practical answers. I believe it is crucial to make my project interdisciplinary to make it more practical and incorporate different perspectives and approaches from different disciplines.
J: Many people disagree with the injustice the current economic system creates. By adhering to the rules of capitalism, we support it and contribute to sustaining and perpetuating injustice. Yet, I feel unable to escape this system. I wonder how is the individual imaginary related to the whole big system. It seems to me that the economic system influences an individual imaginary more than an individual imaginary influences the economic system.
I: I would say: yes and no. That is a starting point for a very long discussion. In my view, you shape the world and the world shapes you back. You evolved to adapt to the environment, but eventually, you became the environment. You could maybe even say that you co-evolved.
Think about the stock market. Imagine that the changes in the market are present on the screen and the graph shows that the value of a certain good will start going down. If you show the graph to the traders, they will start selling it and its value will indeed start going down. The representation of what is going to happen is shaping what is going to happen.
Referring to your reflection on the individual perspective, I believe that understanding how individuals think is also important. Individual subjectivities are what drive the thoughts of people who design the apparently objective processes such as the purchases we make. I go buy a baguette every morning, which I pay for with money. But I do not question the money when I use it. And that is how the money is supposed to work. It is this modernistic aesthetic of not feeling anything, not touching anything. When you touch the flat screen of your phone you do not question the material. You just use the interface to get to the virtual world. As I mentioned before, the finance system is trying to design its processes, so that there is as little friction as possible. It does not want people to be constantly aware of how they spend their money and where their money goes. This lack of friction makes it function very efficiently. This also means that if anything goes slightly in the wrong direction, the situation will worsen exponentially.
My last point is that to redesign our financial system, people need to understand how it works. It is not going to be easy, however, since people do not even have access to it. 90% of the financial system is in the financial sphere and not in the real economy. When you pay for your food with the money you have in your account, you only see 10% of what is happening with it. We need to see what happens with our money in the stock market. We need to see how and where it is invested.
The people who know how it works are the ones who work in the field. But the ones who ask philosophical questions about it are often the ones who have time to read books. That is why we need an interdisciplinary approach and expertise in various fields. We need to see the big picture but also understand the small details of everything.
Yet, the interdisciplinary projects take a lot of time. You need to understand a lot of things and find your own way of collecting the dots. For this, I used the metaphor of Cnidarians. Overall, I see my project as a long-lasting research that will become a platform to collaborate with people who are not in the art world. I don’t want to just make an art piece about this project and let it stand somewhere in an art gallery. I want this project to invite into a dialogue people who come from very different fields and who usually do not have discussions with each other. I would like to get together mathematicians, biologists, economists etc. I hope the project will last at least a few more years and will have a chance to gain the momentum it needs to last.
*In Julia’s interpretation, post-extractivism implies non-exploitative relationships with ourselves and other beings (human, non-human, living and non-living) based on reciprocity and leaving space for the regeneration of ourselves and others.
**Hyperobject - a term coined by Timothy Morton in the book “The Ecological Thought” (2010). Hyperobject is an object or event whose dimensions in space and time are massive compared to human life, eg. a black hole, the Amazon forest, an oilfield, and especially climate.” (Hyperobject - Oxford Reference. (n.d.). Retrieved May 27, 2024, from https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/acref/9780198794790.001.0001/acref-9780198794790-e-771)
***Imaginaries describe how people imagine and think of the world around them (Taylor, 2007, as cited in James, 2019, p. 40). The term links to practise, as the imaginaries are often not described theoretically or communicated explicitly, but through for instance practices, stories or symbols (Taylor, 2007, as cited in Beaman & Stacey, 2021, p. 4; Parameshwar Gaonkar, 2002, p. 4)
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