Events update and call for writers, Meme salons wrapped, next event with AST, first 0x004 report, Socialising Tokens panel, mention in MIT journal
Dear fellow discourse lovers,
It seems our hopes for a prompt return to IRL events has been stymied by another dose of viral realism here in Berlin. Not to worry, we will carry on with our virtual program in the interim and hope to see you for real, real soon. Stay safe out there!
A janitorial note on the winter virtual salon season, next events and call for writers
It’s been a wild winter for the 0x Salon! We organised 10 virtual discussions between late December and now, averaging almost one per week. We learned so much from these many experiments in scaling up, but the breakneck pace has had drawbacks too. We’ve fallen behind on our writing and artistic activities, and are being kept quite busy by other projects which were in a lull over viral winter.
To catch up and take the time to reflect on our next steps, there will be no open calls for a while until we work out how to organise them more efficiently, given the greatly increased levels of interest. To this end, we have opened up a General Participation Request Form which you are welcome to complete at your convenience. The janitors will make selected invitations based on participant background and prior contributions for upcoming events.
Of course, if any of you dear readers and salon friends want to get involved in our writing activities - we try to make it fun and you will get full attribution - please get in touch (the0xsalon [at] gmail [dot] com). You’ll be directly helping us redirect our attention to organising more events, and you’ll also be given priority access to the now very oversubscribed attendance spots at the salons themselves.
Mimesis & Memetics salons wrapped
We recently held a pair of meme-salons recently, and they were a blast! We had linguists, psychoanalysts, political meme researchers, eco-shitposters and the odd ‘just don’t think about it’ enjoyer in the mix. Probably the most fun ones yet…we will have to revisit sometime! Below is the blurb we wrote as pre-amble, and the are.na channel shared between the two sessions will give an idea of the ground we covered.
For 0x Salon's first venture beyond our own memetic practice (m3m3plex on instagram / Magic Gallery on are.na) and into a meta-discussion of internet memes, we aim to bring together meme admins and practitioners, researchers and theorists, and casual viewers alike.
Our discussion will move beyond the Dawkinsian notion of memetics often invoked in academic discourse and instead center banal internet memes, which circulate between our screens and spread forcefully into the world outside.
Next AST co-hosted salon upcoming ::: Entanglements Between Nature & Infrastructure
In last month’s newsletter we announced our event series co-hosted by coastal ecology focused artist collective Alliance of the Southern Triangle - reminder that their Protocols for the Phase Transition article was a recommended text for 0x004. The next one is on ‘Entanglements Between Nature & Infrastructure’ and joining AST and the salon janitors will be Anna Tsing, Keller Easterling, Tega Brain and Matthew Lutz. Words cannot convey our excitement! We’ll let you know how it goes.
0x004 ::: The Forest from the Trees ::: first written outputs published
Though we said above that the writing has been slow going, we have managed to make a start on writeups for 0x004 ::: The Forest from the Trees. So far, Daniel has written up a short piece on the etymology and disambiguation of the title phrase. We will endeavour to add to the collection as soon as we can!
Socialising tokens panel @ Trust for Moneylab Berlin
A few salon colleagues took part in a panel discussion on “Socialising Tokens” recently. We had fun participating, and the conversation was pretty good so go check it out if that’s your sort of thing. Almost no mention of the NFT buzz, but that isn’t to say that the salon is necessarily avoiding the topic…
0x Salon mentioned in Massachusetts Institute of Technology journal
There are rumours that our humble not-even-an-organisation is getting mentioned in publications from storied and famous institutions. The next issue - set to be published imminently - of the MIT Computational Law Report will feature the first in a series of columns by some trespasser that appears to be covering a lot of the topics that we discuss in the salon. What a remarkable coincidence…
0x005 ::: The Indifference Engine ::: next topic update
We haven’t forgotten about The Indifference Engine! We are planning our upcoming season on Bitcoin’s ecological externalities and have lined up some incredible themes and co-hosts already. Meanwhile, it should be noted that we front-ran the current (low quality) public discourse on PoW energetics by quite some time - indeed the day of our 27th December CCC Keynote was when the hashrate graph underwent a phase transition into a new domain of upward acceleration.
Recap: 0x Salon Reviews & Explainers
We wrote some things to try and better explain what the 0x Salon is and does. Not easy!