Penny Rafferty
Penny Rafferty is an independent writer and theorist. Her work stands for a social, collaborative, and open-ended/unpredictable approach to technology and advocates for putting culture structures first. Against the backdrop of increasingly precarious working conditions, she has been applying the DAO (Decentral Autonomous Organization) idea to problems in the art world in Berlin since 2018. This led to the founding of Black Swan DAO,a proto-institution whose goal is to channel resources from established institutions to cultural workers and manage them collectively. While blockchain technology has been used primarily in the financial sector, the Black Swan DAO serves as a fascinating case study for the application of Web3 principles and technology to effect positive change in the cultural and creative sectors.
In addition, Penny Rafferty is Co-Principle Investigator of the Serpentine Galleries Blockchain R&D Lab and co-leads the think tank series Artworld DAO's and The Radical Friends Summit (2019-2022), developed in collaboration with the Serpentine Galleries, Furtherfield, Haus der Kunst Munich and Goethe Institut London, with Ruth Catlow and Ben Vickers.
In 2022, she and Catlow published Radical Friends - Decentralised Autonomous Organisations and the Arts, combining five years of research into a toolkit for critical thinking and connectivity. In it, based on Web 3 thinking, they defy established systems of centralized control in the arts industry and other financial networks.
Penny Rafferty will talk at Künstlerhaus Wien on May 31.