Computers and Capital: The Rise of Digital Currency

Bitcoin presents a new paradigm: the shift in money regulation from the national bureaucracy of competing banks, to the international computational world of networks and algorithms. Coinfest is an opportunity to disseminate information about these new currencies and also to reflect on what the change will come to mean. Computers and Capital presents a series of artists whose medium shifts to the same new medium that digital currencies are moving towards: the computer. How does the computer work as a canvas, and how does this cultural canvas relate to a digital shift in our global financial system? As financial power shifts from the hands of the national economic hierarchy into the processing power of our chips and laptops, what will the societal implications be? Computers and Capital hopes to provide a forum to begin to consider these questions: to promote education and awareness of digital currency, and to think about what it will mean on a broader, social level.

This web installation is concurrent with a new media exhibit co-curated by Erik Zepka and Wesley Yuen for Coinfest 2014 in Vancouver, BC.