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Speaker: parasew

Director and Chief Scientific Officer at RIAT. Technology theorist, project developer and enthusiast for immutable and unstoppable code. Researcher in Open Hardware, privacy and decentralisation. Board member (secretary) of the OSHWA - Open Source Hardware Association.

Hello world. I have a background as digital bricoleur and in computer science, and developed projects on the intersections of design and experimental technology since the last millenium. I worked with Open Source projects since my early childhood and I am an autodidact in many technological domains. I was a professional computer game tester and reviewer from 1986-1992. Later i studied computer science and did a diploma in digital and media arts at the University of applied arts in Vienna with Peter Weibel and Karel Dudesek. After different ventures and startups in early 2000 (big data, noSQL, distributed systems) i started the Coded Cultures initiative, a research platform to bring hacker culture and technology-based arts closer together. This resulted in the Coded Cultures Festival which was running from 2004-2016 and was showcased in Austria, Germany and Japan. In 2010 i founded the Artistic Bokeh group, a taskforce for DSLR video hacks and radical media arts. I developed the first bitcoin-based artwork, bitcoincloud, which was initially shown in 2011 as part of the "Art and Capital" exhibition. Bitcoincloud was maybe the most inefficient Bitcoin Mining rig, as it only mined when visitors were watching the artpiece, in order to thematize the "attention economy". In 2012 i received a three year research grant from the austrian science fund (FWF) and set up the Artistic Technology Lab at the University of applied arts in Vienna. There i started the Experiments in Art and Value series, with “Blockchain Performance” (2012), a co-production of Artistic Bokeh & Spacebank (Fran Ilich) in which 20 Ai Weiwei Sunflower Seeds have been purchased with Bitcoin and Artistic Bokeh & Société Réaliste: "Too much money" (2014). Also in 2014 i wrote the paper "Cryptocurrencies as distributed community experiments", as a chapter for the Handbook of Digital Currency - Bitcoin, Financial Instruments and Big Data. From 2014 onwards i only worked and researched on decentralisation and different blockchain technologies, and also coordinated the Apertus Open Source Cinema EU Horizon2020 project. Since 2017 i am solely working on the RIAT research agenda and coordinate publication projects and technological research and development. I am currently responsible for the research design and for the long term strategy at the RIAT Institute.

Contact

E-Mail: parasew@gmail.com

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