Slowly but surely the Exchanghibition Bank keeps infiltrating in the “real” banking world. Beginning of this year our CEO Dadara was an artist-in-residence at the ASN Bank, and last Friday the Exchanghibition Bank popped up in the ABN AMRO Dialogues House.

Dadara gave a talk about Art as Money, and there was a (first) screening of the “Transformoney 2.0″ documentary about money and the Transformoney Tree at Burning Man made by Dadara together with director Daniel Nogueira.

The public was a nice mix of bankers and burners. Since (almost) everybody on this planet uses money every single day, money indeed might be a great way to unify us and bring different groups of people together, instead of dividing us.

Everybody who attended the talk and screening received a Love banknote, which they could immediately register at our laptop, assisted by an Exchanghibition Banker.

Isn’t a bank, after all, a great place to start spreading some Love?

All photos by Arianne Notenboom

[12.07.12] Expositie van Dadara in Famous, Amsterdam

The immediate occasion for my sketchbook was frustration that was caused by a grabber. From a distance grabbing is easy to recognize. But from close you can’t believe of what you see.

There are some things I do not understand: How for example can it be that one of the richest countries, such as the Netherlands is deep into national debt? That is why I, as a drawing journalist went on a journey of research. Because through drawing I can understand a little bit more of that what I see.

I started a sketchbook to portray an image of the Netherlands nowadays from the ‘money, economy and crisis’point of view. Atlas van Stolk has bought it. The Atlas van Stolk is a unique national collection of approximately 150,000 prints and drawings and, as such draws the bigger picture of our national history. “The Netherlands of today” will become history tomorrow. It will consist of a wide variety of topics: from a public Occupy meeting in Rotterdam occupy, to a meeting of the SER, a shop in the street selling gold, Antillean Catering and an exhibition of an artist who notes that big cuts are happening in the Arts, and banks are being massively subsidized, so as an artist better can start his own bank.

Stories and sketches. Sketches and associations, as the animal tamer, whose lions have little to no say in the show. People with savings also have hardly any say. The bank manager does get a bonus, even if he don’t do a good job.

[28.02.12] Openbare vergadering Occupy Rotterdam, Beursplein Rotterdam

[16.05.12] Voorstelling ‘De Prooi’ van Het Nationale Toneel in de Koninklijke Schouwburg Den Haag

[02.06.12] Dompteur Dieck van Circus Renz op het Multiplein in Rotterdam

So, in order to acquire a 2012 banknote money alone is not enough, we also want your Idea for Change, which will then be printed on a special “2012-Time for Change” certificate which belongs to your uniquely numbered banknote.

Here’s a selection of some recent inspiring Ideas for Change submitted:

-We could make money of edible paper, so you can eat your cash if you want to. Since so much money is being created by big banks, we can retrieve edible money from an ATM and give it to people who needs food. This way we destroy money again, which, of course hopefully, will turn into a balance of creation and destruction of money.

- Money is designed for the size of our hands, for us humans. We could create money that is a bit too big, hard to handle, let’s say bills of 10 cents, 20 cents, etc. the size of an A1 sheet. You’re not allowed to fold it, you can only pay cash. This will reduce the way we use money; it will be too much hassle to carry it with you so you won’t buy too much, only the necessary stuff you need for living. Or you make money so small you easily lose it, or that you can hardly see it. This makes you loose a lot of money, but banks can continue create money and keep the balance.

- The only way to get rid of our money is to start producing our own food again; everybody a garden. I will starve to death because I can’t keep plants living… Every activity is by law represented by an amount of food. One website for 1,000kg potatos and 5kg asparagus. One visit to the doctor for 10kg of apples, 10kg of oranges and 5 avocados.

- Paper money is too beautiful to get rid of it. I’d like to have much more different banknotes, from different size and different money, just like post stamps, change design every couple of months. Money will be much more colorful, much nicer to handle. Paper money represents something visual attractive. We should get rid of digital money since it is even less tangible than paper money. All banks, traders, bonds, etc. should be made of real tangible materials again. So big transactions will have real world problems. In stead of moving with the speed of light from one bank to another, you’ll have much more Brink’s on the road. This will reduce the amount of super speedy transactions and will keep bankers from going for the short term hits.

–It is Time To Change money back to its origin: A medium of exchange in between, not only gratifying one partner, but being able to be used to exchange anything with anyone. We have to stop using the money to make even more money just through ripping off other people that do not have enough money to do this too. Lets give the money to those who deserve it. One smile is invaluable.

4’33’’

On 16 of January 2004 the symfonic orchestra of the BBC played 4’33’’ by John Cage. Four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence, in three parts for orchestra and clarinet.

View it on Youtube. It’s a rather odd video. You can see the conductor turning the pages of the music score in an orderly manner. The people in the audience are seated as if they are the pupils in the classroom of a stern geography teacher. The violinists look at an undefined point in space, to prevent them from bursting into uncontrollable, hysterical laughter. The conductor wipes the sweat of his forehead using a tissue and the camera zooms in on a beautiful blonde looking as if she’s immersed in deep thoughts. The breaks in between the three parts of silence are being enthousiastically used to cough, to hiccup and throat clearing. And once it’s all over, a thunderous applause follows in which the relief that it is indeed finally all over can clearly be felt.

Also at BBC radio the tension was rising, because it’s not that usual to broadcast silence on the radio. Special ‘silence detectors’ sharply monitor if there is sound on the radio. Reliable equipment is constantly on guard to prevent it from being silent longer than ten seconds. To make the BBC-broadcast of 4’33” run smoothly, a technician is needed to pull a special switch to turn off the surveillance system. If for instance a radio DJ faints or accidentally spills coffee in the mixing board, then after ten seconds a back-up disk will start buzzing, with mainstream music, such as Madonna and George Michael. If a minute of silence is being held to commemorate something a sound technician needs to turn off those silence detectors. Normally this will work okay. But all employees will be relieved when not suddenly after ten seconds a Madonna song will start blaring from the speakers. To prevent this kind of stress, some radio stations prefer to broadcast birdcalls of other ‘silence’. Lots of anecdotes circulate in radio land about commentators coughing every ten seconds into the microphone whenever there is an unexpected minute of silence due to another deceased soccer chairman. Also lovers of ambient silence music have been on occasion woken up out of their sound trip by some pounding music out of the surveillance system. It happened to John Peel when de band Low played live in his program and dropped a long silence in one of their songs to build up a subtle form of tension. Unfortunately to no result since the ‘dead air’ tape started to play. Suddenly “9PM (Till I Come)” sounded. But none of this happened on the 16th of January 2004, during the performance of 4’33″. What could be heard though, were people coughing and moving around. But mostly this just happened during the short breaks in between the three acts.

And that’s how it should be. Cage got the idea for 4’33’ when he visited a ‘dead room’ at Harvard University. A room which wouldn’t let any sounds in from the outside, and where all sounds being made inside the room went mute instantly. But Cage clearly heard two sounds. A low and a high tone. The acoustic scientist explained to Cage that the low-pitched sound was the hum of his blood circulation and the high-pitched sound tinnitus, from which a lot of musicians suffer. Silence doesn’t exist.

Cage had already for a longer time been a fan of non-musically intended sounds, the rustle of the wind, the buzzing of traffic and the lapping of water. But not only Cage. Among the drivers who never listen to the radio, but to the sounds of traffic, are an above-average amount of sound engineers and musicians. Among the people who rarely listen to music at home are many composers and producers. There are very few people who enjoy music less than music professionals. They won’t let the whole world know, but most composers won’t be very pleased with a CD as a birthday gift. You can better give them headphones with an anti-sound feature.

The combination of these two observations gave Cage the idea for his silent composition. He figured there wasn’t a better way to point his public to the sounds of their surroundings. And there were surrounding sounds during the first performance in 1952 by pianist David Tudor. People constantly rose to their feet to leave while shaking their head and grumbling.

(editors note: I guess Gerard Janssen could be considered to be an expert on nothing – after all he co-wrote the book ‘Holes and other things which are not there’ by the Easy Aloha’s)

In a world where even art seems to be measured by its financial value, the value of money itself is increasingly becoming unclear…

The Exchanghibition Bank explores the value of Money and art in relation to the values of its Customers. In that process we offer the chance to spiritually launder money for Millions, Zero and Infinite amounts of, well, what actually?.

On behalf of Burning Man’s Art Grant Committee, I would like to thank you for your art grant proposal. To say we had to make some tough decisions would be an understatement. We received 349 proposals asking for almost $5 million in funding. They included some of the most beautiful, most inspiring, most innovative projects ever conceived for the Black Rock Desert.

 I am thrilled to tell you we have decided to fund your application.

 We really appreciate all the time and effort and creativity you put into this concept, and cannot wait to work with you.

 With great thanks,

Beth Scarborough

Aka Bettie June

Associate Director of Art Management

Burning Man

More news about our new project – The Transformoney Tree – very soon, but for now I just wanted to share the good news!

I will just lift a little tip of the veil; this new project will be the follow-up to the Exchanghibition Bank in Black Rock Desert, so it will again deal with money in that moneyless vast space. And we will need lots and lots of one-dollar bills -not as a financial instrument though, but as a material to create art!

If you are interested to help us out with collecting these physical banknotes then please send us an email to inartwetrust (at) artasmoney (dot) com . We will need the community to make this happen at Burning Man 2012…………

As a definition in progress, let us call them Money Artist = Artists, who question any art of market and are using the elements and laws/rules of the market as part of their artistic creation process.

We are one of them and our artistic focus is on the price as an element; on the formation of prices as a law of the market.

Usually the price is something external for the creation of art: The price is suggested by the artist, doubled by the gallery, influenced by so called art-experts and finally decided by the market. Instead of the price being the result of the market, of demand and supply, we entangle date, number and price – somehow like in physics the quantum entanglement. If one of these elements changes the two others have to follow simultaneously.

For example, if we want to create the next art work, which is the next number, we have to do this on the next day, because that’s the imposed artistic rule: If you add one to the number, one day is added to the date and 10 Cent to the value.

In other words: Due to our rule, which entangles number, day and value, we create just one art work a day, but each day one and by that the art work itself determines the financial value and not the artist, the gallery or the ups and downs of the art market.

The interesting point is, although the price is created in a quite unusual way, the outcome is marketable and saleable like any other art work or commodity. What might be new is that the price and the pricing becomes part of the experience of art, part of the aesthetic!

As a diagram:

The explanation “How it works” is part of each art print, written in small letters at the bottom, but we think a visualization might help you to understand our money art concept easier. So please watch the birth of the art work Nr.: 93.6595 / Value: 567,30 € / Date: 14.10.2010:

On the 15.10.2010 we created he next art work with the Nr.: 93.6596  and its value: 567,40 € and so and on …

by Christopher Temt, 2012

www.kmentemt.com

P.S. There are still a few old and therefore cheap art works as prints available. Just make your query on our homepage by entering either a number, a date or a specific price and press “Query” to find out if your desired piece of money art is still avaliable !

The Exchanghibition Bank’s 2012 banknote is not just about financial exchange: In order to acquire a 2012 banknote money alone won’t be enough, our customers will also need to provide us with their Idea for Change.

For your inspiration we will regularly post the Ideas for Change of our (20)12 Ambassadors – The second Ambassador we are introducing to you: Ross Ashcroft and his idea for change in 2012. (For more info about the 2012 banknote’s philosophy please click HERE and to view Daniel Pinchbeck’s Idea for Change click HERE)

His Idea for Change:

“Give me control of a nation’s money supply, and I care not who makes its laws.”

Human progress requires reform of the monetary system. Peace and prosperity depend on long-term stability in the money supply. This means removing the right to create money from privately owned banks who are currently incentivized to expand the money supply in search of private profits.

Private money issue benefits only a small minority and leads to regular economic slumps which hit the most vulnerable hardest. Issuing new money as debt places and unnecessary and ultimately inescapable burden on the economy and society.

There is a more malevolent aspect to this draconian process. Money created by private banks is used for speculation in commodity markets – including those for food and other essentials. This disrupts the pricing mechanism and leads to poor people being priced out of the market.

The establishment of derivatives markets for speculative purposes, and the practice of ‘trading on margin’ whereby money is created purely for speculation and through which the rich extract wealth from those who create it, has no place in a civilized society.

Leaving the control of the money supply in the hands of bankers is a recipe for continued instability, conflict and economic exclusion. Amschel Rothchild’s famous 19th century quote is disturbingly relevant today: “Give me control of a nation’s money supply, and I care not who makes its laws”.

My idea is that on 12/21/12 money creation should be put in the hands of the public and any interest made out of this function be paid back to the community or nation through a citizens’ dividend.

Only by reforming the monetary system can we begin to build our economy on a solid foundation.

Ross Ashcroft is a filmmaker born in Liverpool, UK. He graduated from the Royal Agricultural College and then worked in London’s West End as an Assistant Director. He is a co-founder of the London based independent production company Motherlode. He is a Renegade Economist and director of Four Horsemen. He lives and works in London.

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Jasper van Es creates new Euro bills from two original bills. The used bills put together have the same value as the new bill.

Overprized bricks
In fact the real money is in the bricks, literally. For a moment of time, Artist Frank Buckly was the owner of € 1.4 billion of hard cash. But he shredded the huge pile of banknotes and made insulating bricks out of it from which he built a house. Although a bit overprized, the house looks pretty cool.

Generous
The artist lived in the house for a week in an art project intended to stimulate debate about the value of money in post-Celtic tiger island. The money was awarded to Frank for his installation by the national mint under strict terms. I wonder how they are ever going to recoup that.