Blockchain Papers

Michael P. Moynihan

In 1978, after a decade of designing eccentric cybernetic installations— such as labyrinths for living animals and computationally controlled plant environments—Luis Fernando Benedit, a conceptual artist and architect from Buenos Aires, drew a series of eight houses for a World Congress in Mexico City organized by the Union of International Architects (UIA).1 The series title, Las casas que cuestan un millón (Houses that cost a million), was a sardonic critique of the conference's theme of “Architecture and National Development” and openly mocked the rhetoric of low-cost housing presented to development aid organizations throughout the decade such as Christopher Alexander's Low-Cost Housing, Yona Friedman's No-Cost Housing, and the work done by the Minimum Cost Housing Group.2Unlike other architects presenting at the UIA World Congress, Benedit was not looking to access flows of international finance or to share research. His examples of high-cost housing were hand drawn, each appearing visually distinct, beginning in a cartoonish tone with topiary gardens and large curving cantilevers. Throughout the series, the houses gradually evolve into austere, sharp geometric forms reminiscent of brutalism or bomb shelters. Their similarities are more subtle: Each drawing includes a subterranean living space, underground entrances, solar panels, and other small-scale eco-technologies popularized in the 1970s. The format, speed, and level of detail in the drawings are similar to a style of communication media in self-help manuals and appropriate-technology discourse, where a comic format was the visualization technique encouraged by the United Nations for disseminating expertise to a new class of self-builders around the world.3 Yona Friedman, the most well-known architect for utilizing this comic style for his own promotion within development programs, was unable to attend the congress in Mexico City, because he was in Bolivia the same week at a UNESCO seminar presenting a housing project that promised minimum cost for governments and “no cost” to inhabitants.4 Friedman's busy schedule in the fall of 1978 reflects the renewed fervor of development discourse in the late 1970s, as housing became the primary strategy pushed by international agencies and economists looking to promote national development and manage rural-urban migration.5Unlike a step-by-step comic strip illustrating how to build a home, Benedit's houses narrate the rise of bureaucratic authoritarianism in Argentina and were drawn for an international forum as a way to comment subversively on the social, political, and technological changes occurring during the ongoing dictatorship (1976–1983) led by General Jorge Rafael Videla. During this period, clandestine torture centers and death raids were used in the enforced disappearance of more than thirty thousand people accused of political dissent.6 Under the dictatorship's so-called Process of National Reorganization (Proceso de reorganización nacional or El proceso), most democratic institutions were repressed; Congress was suspended, political parties were banned, and civil rights were limited.7Building on a decade of computational and technological artworks, Benedit used the conceptual language of cybernetics and closed systems as a metaphor to call attention to ongoing censorship and repression in Argentina, which were coupled with new policies focused on increasing agricultural exports and a drive to attract foreign investment through rural agribusiness development in the country's interior. Benedit was drawn to cybernetics and early computation in the late 1960s because it offered a new language of control to speak about how bodies are disciplined in social space. A decade later, he used the idea of closed systems as a metaphor for the state's transition of the countryside into a space of technological experimentation. In the final house of the series, Casa H, aboveground, there is an inflatable plastic bubble encasing a technologically regulated and ecologically circular agricultural environment. The crops growing inside are intended as produce for the expanding agro-export economy and part of a closed ecological system of dependency, fed by the carbon dioxide produced by a family living belowground, hidden in an underground shelter.8 Presented at a world congress focused on the role of architects in national development, Las casas served not merely as an illustration of how development policies in Argentina played out in the 1970s but also as a warning for architects in attendance who were looking to participate in shaping development discourse.The weeklong World Congress in Mexico City was organized amid fears within the UIA that professional architects were losing ground to other experts involved in global development. The organization formed in 1948 through the merger of several existing architectural associations in Western Europe. By 1978, the Mexico City congress demonstrated the geographic expansion of the UIA, with more than five thousand architects present, representing nearly eighty countries. In the opening speech of the plenary session, the soon-to-be president of the UIA, Rafael de La-Hoz, stoked fears of a crisis in the profession: “Today,” he said, “National Development is taking place without the help of architects.”9Like many other speakers during the week in Mexico City, La-Hoz cited the Club of Rome's report The Limits to Growth, which had been central to the discussions at the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (Stockholm, 1972).10 He also noted that architects had not been invited to participate in a network of world conferences and congresses organized in the 1970s, such as at the UN Habitat Conference in Vancouver.11 Of course, other issues directly affected professional architects during the decade—such as global stagflation following the 1973 OPEC oil embargo and a general decline in global construction— but La-Hoz's speech suggested that architects themselves were to blame. Architects, he said, had fallen behind in what he referred to as “the information age,” and needed to adapt to new computer-aided technologies capable of integrating their practice with global econometric and environmental modeling, what he referred to, more generally, as “a systems approach.”12For the first time in the thirty-year history of the UIA, professionals from outside of architecture participated extensively. Walking through the exhibitions and listening to the debates during the week, this change would be apparent through the onslaught of statistics alone. Graphs and figures replaced orthographic projections of buildings, representing energy costs, military expenditures, chemical fertilizers measured in barrels, and hunger and famine measured in bodies.13 The new emphasis on data reflected a larger project La-Hoz had been working on for the previous three years called ARKISYST, a new global architectural information system developed by the UIA. Like Noah's Ark, which La-Hoz invoked as its allegorical inspiration, ARKISYST was intended to save the profession and supply practicing architects with real-time information needs, modeled off systems in other fields intended to promote international cooperation in the decade.14 Although the project was eventually canceled, his speech was planned to coincide with the opening of an information center hosted in Mexico City. The location was selected to take advantage of Mexico's access to international development loans and state funding for a new computer center for housing research.15Luis Fernando Benedit's inclusion within this world congress was unusual. The UIA imagined the event as a forum to bring architects experienced in computation, systems analysis, and managerial cybernetics into conversation with politicians, economists, and technocratic elites. Although trained as an architect in the early 1960s at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, Benedit had become internationally well known for creating computational and cybernetic art environments. In 1968, in an exhibition titled Microzoo, he built labyrinths for living cats, tropical fish, birds, ants, snails, and cockroaches.16 One reviewer of Benedit's labyrinths wrote, “Watching the creatures shivering in the museum's air-conditioning, one felt the experimentation—both scientific and cultural— to be quite sinister.”17 A year later he participated in Arte y Cibernética, the first exhibition in Argentina with computer-generated artwork, and was a founding member of the Grupo de Arte y Cibernética.18In Las casas que cuestan un millón there are several references to Benedit's earlier work. The recurring forms throughout the houses, which alternate between sweeping curved cantilevers and triangular pitched roofs, are pulled almost directly from a painting series called Supercomodo (1969) and a house he designed in 1969 for Antonio Battro, an Argentine neurological scientist. In the front yard of Casa B, there is an apiary and a labyrinth. Positioned near the front door, the apiary refers to his work Biotrón, exhibited at the 1970 Venice Biennale, where he collaborated with Battro to build a habitat in which honeybees pollinated computer-controlled artificial flowers.19 The labyrinth in the drawing refers to a series of works in the early 1970s, such as Laberinto invisible (1971), exhibited in Buenos Aires, and Laberinto para ratones blancos II, exhibited at a solo show at MOMA in 1972.20 The exhibition at MOMA was internationally celebrated for a hydroponic environment named Fitotrón, where Benedit grew cabbage and peppers under high-intensity metal halide lamps inside the gallery.21Throughout Las casas series, each house includes a hydroponic garden connected to solar-powered compressors, filters, and extractors. In the first half of the series, the hydroponic gardens are supplemental, positioned on the exterior of the house. By Casa D, the hydroponic chamber attaches directly to the living quarters with diagrammatic arrows pointing outward. In the final house, the hydroponic garden takes over the entire living space. These references to Benedit's earlier projects were likely intended to position his own life and career within the rising authoritarianism in his home country. Although these houses are not exclusively cybernetic, this self-quotation also allows the series to be read as a continuation of a decade-long experiment with labyrinths and plant environments, which attempted to study through the observation of feedback dynamics how environmental changes modify behavior, in particular how humans, nonhumans, and machines are structurally interconnected with their environments.22Such self-reflection also makes clear that Benedit was an internationally relevant actor in a global artistic movement where artists worldwide appropriated cybernetic and systems theories as conceptual tools for both dematerializing the art object and reconfiguring artistic practice as relational and participatory. Exhibitions such as Cybernetic Serendipity in London in 1968 institutionalized this turn, inviting collaboration between artists and computer scientists.23 Scholarship on systems art has often relied on narratives of unidirectional flows of expertise— in particular, through the relationship between cybernetic art and the U.S. military-industrial complex—while also tending to exclude actors in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. This omission is surprising, given the large number of bureaucrats, artists, academics, and government officials all over the world who helped shape cybernetic science in their own contexts.24 As Eden Medina shows in her scholarship on Cybersyn—a cybernetic system for managing the Chilean national economy developed in the early 1970s during the presidency of Salvador Allende— local engineers were already knowledgeable about managerial cybernetics out to to help the International was to the history of not in the collaboration between in the United and the in The of art systems science and cybernetics was in the exhibition in Buenos titled Arte de which more than one artists from Argentina, and This of art Benedit within a global discourse how technologies were not by their but by their to change and adapt in a of political and social 1978, Benedit had become a central in a in in Argentina, where artists used systems and cybernetics as both a metaphor and conceptual language for the rise of authoritarianism in the late Argentina had become a global center for technological art with a of to art the by works by the of and in and and by Fernando and institutions such as the de Arte the and an Argentine through that and In these artists in on and In a of new such as cybernetic became a new conceptual language to the art As art in 1968, the role of cybernetics in art was show that art not in but in between people and the of their in to the of art in Argentina, several artists with these artistic and to experiment with to the between art and creating and outside of the that General to these on more political such as and the project is appropriated media and to state and these works a critique of and the conceptual and political from which Benedit's own in cybernetics these more with the idea of the as a metaphor for artists repression and Benedit's to the underground in these houses to on during the of the dictatorship's El the of and and the rise of technocratic in his references to both the underground and to small-scale Benedit called attention to the relationship between ongoing repression and the drive to attract foreign investment through rural development technocratic and the metaphor of the at a world congress focused on the role in national casas que cuestan un millón a architectural of authoritarianism in Argentina, where rural housing programs, designed to access international had been into tools for repression and first Benedit's houses share a in his earlier the in Casa de from the of a connected to an subterranean read as a series, the houses to transition from to In the first houses A and Casa there are and a front As the series into the imagined the and replaced with and each the of the underground space In the first houses, the is By the final house, Casa H, the subterranean and is to that and a for and The is from the of underground and civil in the United which imagined the life of the class out the with and the of In Benedit's by there are of The ground is not but The life inside one of these underground is or read the houses to narrate an environment of increasing censorship and houses were drawn in the of 1978, clandestine torture centers and death raids had become a of life in Buenos of their these torture centers were often within the but out of the de de in the center had been from an into the torture center in the country. 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all to this with a at integrating architectural practice within increasing flows of international finance through of and development. This how the of development had the professional and social of the 1970s. As a art in a of the this had a to with a throughout almost all the presented throughout the that national development, and are In this Las casas que cuestan un millón as a warning about the of development as a and of in which architects become

Daniel Robins

Abstract Cryptocurrency remittances overcome many regulatory and practical barriers, but there is little empirical research into this increasingly popular remittance medium. In response, this article explores cryptocurrency remittances from Latin America and the Caribbean into Venezuela. Cryptocurrencies as a remittance medium conveys important messages for advocates and critics. To appropriately critique cryptocurrencies, it is important to understand how they are used in the ‘every day’ rather than how their use may be characterised by ideologues. Rather than directly relying on ‘trustless’ and decentralised blockchain technology, ‘really existing’ cryptocurrency remittances are highly intermediated. Access to this medium is often hierarchical, stemming from knowledge barriers but also legal status (and by extension, economic status). The ‘need’ for trusted intermediaries prompts discussions around the relationship between ‘trustless’ blockchain technology and cryptocurrency remittances. This article shows that stablecoins (cryptocurrencies pegged to fiat currencies—usually the US dollar) are the most popular cryptocurrency remittance medium. Stablecoins challenge institutional attempts to geographically restrict currencies, yet also contribute to global processes of dollarisation. This is important to understanding how stablecoins simultaneously undermine spatial barriers to financial access yet may create new ones in the process.

Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado

In the context of a book such as A History of Mexican Literature , the discussion and selection of works from a literary period in progress is, at the very least, a problematic endeavor. It is always possible that the most recognized works of the contemporary epoch will slowly slide into oblivion – or that the masterworks that capture the present in all its intensity are being written unbeknownst to literary critics. Mexican literature of the neoliberal era, which roughly starts with the cultural policies of the administration of Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988–1994) and continues to this day, is still a work in progress. To account for it, one must mainly focus on the processes that have defined literature as a set of institutional undertakings that differ in fundamental ways from the postrevolutionary period covered in the other articles in this section, as well as on the aesthetic, ideological, and cultural consequences of these endeavors in works currently considered significant. Some of the phenomena that unfold throughout the 1990s include: the emergence of the Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes (Conaculta) and its impact on funding for writers; the corporate consolidation of the editorial world and the emergence of independent publishers against the grain of corporatization; the decentralization of literary writing away from the institutions of Mexico City; and the emergence, in particular, of a strong current of writing in northern Mexico and the changes brought forward by the Internet in contemporary writing. Conaculta is an institutional body of the Mexican government that concentrates the financing and promotion of a large percentage of artistic and cultural production in Mexico. It was created in 1988 in order to coordinate cultural activities of the federal government, and it exists as a “decentralized” organism under the purview of the Secretaría de Educación Pública (SEP). As far as literature is concerned, Conaculta has developed substantial efforts in different parts of the process. Through its fellowship arm, the Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes (FONCA), it sustains an extensive system of fellowships devoted to the financing of literary artists, ranging from new writers under the age of thirty-five (called Jóvenes Creadores) to authors with a substantial career (in the Sistema Nacional de Creadores Artísticos, under which writers may even get a lifetime fellowship).