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The Emancipation of Money at Open Engagement

I’ll be at Open Engagement in Portland, Oregon May 18-21 with a new project, The Emancipation of Money.

The Emancipation of Money is an experiment in circulating an alternative form of currency (the Free Dollar) among the participants of Open Engagement. With no predetermined purpose or use, the Free Dollar is designed to invite questions and provoke interactions. Hand printed “dollars” will be infiltrated into the social community in a number of ways: left for the taking on open plates, given in spontaneous acts of admiration or amusement, slipped into publications and papers, or offered on request.

The Free Dollar intentionally has no specific use.  It has no denomination, no conventional value.  It is not, like the Ithaca Dollar, the notes of the historic Cincinnati Time Store, or the currency of the recent Time Bank, meant to represent labor. It is closer in spirt to children’s play money, but unlike video game gold or monopoly cash which transmute effort, skill or luck into value, the Free Dollar is untethered to any particular form of reward.  Free Dollars, like any kind of money, can be given, stolen, asked for or accumulated. They are peculiar in that they most likely cannot be spent. The Emancipation of Money asks: What can happen to money in the absence of that familiar act of spending?

The Emancipation of Money is part of an ongoing series of Money Actions in which Randolph has been using the social dimensions of money as the basis of an interactional and interventionist art practice. For the past several years she has given away (real) money in streets, stores, galleries, cafés, at talks, at dinners, over coffee, sometimes anonymously, sometimes in groups or person to person. Because money is caged in rules, simply acting outside these rules opens up new ranges of social action and interaction. This project for Open Engagement extends Money Actions beyond the real, into realms of play and invention.  It is hoped that a purposeless form of money might offer a means of critically engaging the purposes of real money.

If you’re in Portland, join me at a Happy Hour Discussion on Alternative Economies with Stephanie Diamond, Caroline Woolard, Kathryn Kenworth, Sal Randolph
Location: Shigezo. 910 SW Salmon

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