We’ve ben working at creating a peer-to-peer economic and service infrastructure for the Digital Cultures starting from the city of Rome, using blockchains and cryptocurrencies. We will start talking about it at Fotonica Festival in Rome.

How can we design a different, more just, diffused, inclusive, collaborative, mutualistic economy for the relational ecosystems of the digital arts and culture?

This is a question which we have been researching about with many friends and colleagues here in Rome, and with the students of our course at La Sapienza University.

This is why we have decided to start the creation of a city-wide laboratory on peer-to-peer economies, which spreads and makes more accessible and democratic blockchain technologies, digital currencies and peer-to-peer infrastructures.

The laboratory started in close collaboration with a series of subjects from the ecosystem of the digital arts and cultures in Rome: LPM, AVNode, NONE, RGB Light Festival, Francesca Fini, Carlo Infante and Urban Experience, Sheila Ribeiro, ESC Atelier, Andrea Natella, Fondazione Mondo Digitale, Media Arts Festival, Valentino Catricala, and more are quickly coming up.

The University is also closely connected to this process: the Product Design Studio 4 course at the Master of Science in Product Design at L. Quaroni “La Sapienza” University in Rome is dedicated to “Design for Collaborative Economy” and is led by Salvatore Iaconesi, Oriana Persico and Loredana Di Lucchio. The course was dedicated to the creation of service concepts based on the Blockchain and on Cryptocurrencies, so that the class could leave the classroom and spread into the city to make this a truly participative process.

10 design teams have been assigned to 10 actors of the ecosystems to understand how each type of subject could use per-to-peer economies, digital currencies and the blockchain.

Currently the teams are:

Fotonica Festival

Fotonica Festival

The design teams and the participants will meet at the FOTONICA Festival on the 1st and 8th December 2017 to advance the design concepts and to organize an exhibit to showcase and communicate what is being developed.

A series of lectures will help us in the process, while other subjects from the national and international community will support this initiative as it grows, for example with MACAO, and Emanuele Braga and Alberto Cossu, who will bring the experience of CommonCoin and of Robots and Cultural Institutions.

In the following weeks we will communicate the development of a calendar of initiatives, for example with ESC Atelier, in which we will provide workshops and lectures for anyone who wants to learn more about the technologies and concepts we will use for the p2p infrastructures, blockchains and cryptocurrencies, to learn how to design and implement the services, and to critically explore these technologies.