In 1993, a trendy neighborhood of newly reunited ex-East Berlin gave rise to Knochen Bank and its currency, the knochengeld (“bone money”). The highly mediatized artistic experiment lasted only seven weeks, but was one of the first to introduce an ultra-local alternative currency that challenged the role of money in society.

Nils Chlupka walks across his cobblestoned courtyard in a village situated in the far east of Brandenburg. He is surrounded by barns and an old farm, old motorcycles are parked here and there, tomato plants are growing peacefully. Chlupka’s hair is gray and short, his shirtsleeves are rolled up, he wears faded jeans, he has a heavy Berlin accent. Is this the image of a banker? Not quite. But we’re no closer when we try to imagine him in a suit and tie. And yet, this man was indeed a banker in the past, even the director of a bank. That was 21 years ago. Nils Chlupka was the head of Knochenbank (“bone bank”). It existed for exactly seven weeks.

As the director of Knochenbank, from November 10 to December 29, 1993, he administered the alternative payment method “Knochengeld” (“bone money”), which circulated in the Prenzlauer Berg district of Berlin. 5,400 “Knochen” bills, designed by 54 artists, circulated among about 30 bars, galleries and shops in the neighborhood bordered by Oderberger Straße and Marienburger Straße. It was an authentic method of payment, exchangeable for Deutsche Mark (DM).

This extraordinary artistic action was extremely successful. The currency was welcomed with open arms, as people bought out the bank’s almost entire stock of the bills. All expenses related to manufacturing the bills were reimbursed, all the artists received “real” DM, it was covered by all the media, even the “real” world of finance and the museums were interested in the action, which in this form could only exist in this very special place.

At the right place at the right time

Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg in the 1990s was characterized by the dilapidated charm of non-renovated apartment buildings in East Berlin, with spectacular apartments that costed almost nothing. It was the perfect breeding ground for young creatives. Some were already there, others came from all over the world. People met in illegal and legal bars, people opened bars, small shops, experimented in galleries. An atmosphere of renewal prevailed in an environment that was still marked by the failed system, which in turn inspired the cultural circles that flourished there.

Nils Chlupka was the founder and owner of «Kommandantur». It was one of the first bars that opened its doors in 1991 at the foot of the water tower located at the corner of Knaackstraße and Rykestraße. Chlupka grew up in former East Germany, and had just lived through his first currency change from the Ost-Mark to the Deutsche Mark. He was interested in the value and importance of money; he made his own bills for his own bar.

Wolfgang Krause, an artist from Dresde, founded the “o zwei” gallery on Oderberger Straße in 1991. He exhibited photos and paintings, and like almost everyone in the neighborhood, was prepared to make unconventional encounters. And so he invited Bert Papenfuß, who was interested in the value of money, to the gallery. The fourth person to join this alliance was C.H. Adam, a Swiss man “who had already used money for artistic purposes in his native country,” according to Chlupka.

What brought the four together was money, but not in the sense of vile Mammon, the biblical deity of material wealth or greed. They were interested in the role money plays in society. They gathered around the collective Ioë Bsaffot: “It’s slang for ‘fake papers’,” Chlupka explains; and they developed the concept of “Knochengeld”.

The term “Knochengeld” refers to an idea of Diogenes, who believed that money should smell bad and go bad, as that would prevent it from being stashed. The artists also referred to the financial theorist Silvio Gesell (1862-1930), inventor of “melting money”. He also wanted people to use money as a means of exchange and not be able to hoard it. He advanced that money is perishable—that its value “melts” over time. This type of liquid cash with a negative interest rate would be spent fast, which would boost the economy.

5,400 bills numbered by hand and signed

The founders of the collective based in Prenzlauer Berg had a solid network. They were quickly able to convince 30 owners of shops and galleries to help introduce the gestating alternative currency. Within one week, they found 54 artists to design the Knochen. The Knochen were made with various materials, conveyed all sorts of messages, and the graphic design of each one was different. Their only common factor was their size and their value. Each creation was printed in 100 copies. Each one of the 5,400 bills was numbered by hand and signed. Their validity was certified by an official stamp of the Ioë Bsaffot collective.

One bill was worth 20 Knochen, which corresponded to 20 DM. As it was designed to be spent, each week it lost one Knochen of its total value, i.e. one DM. So the Knochen that had not been spent ended up being worth nothing. In the collection points of the participating bars and galleries, each bill was stamped to certify that it had been circulated. Those who had not spent their Knochen could acquire tickets that were pasted onto the bills in order to renew their value.

“We even asked the central bank of Land if what we were doing was legal,” says Chlupka. “We learned that in fact it wasn’t legal, but that we could do it anyway, given that Knochen referred back to DM.” Besides, it was an artistic action for a limited time only.

A gallery transformed into a bank

The “o zwei” gallery became the bank. Bills could be withdrawn in exchange for Deustche Mark or exchanged for DM by the bar and gallery owners. From the start, the artistic action was a total success. “Art collectors and bourgeois came and almost tore the bundles out of our hands,” recalls Chlupka. Each bundle contained a sample of each 20 Knochen bill.

One bundle costed 1,050 DM. Those who could not afford it but who were “chasing” a particular Knochen spent the bills they acquired individually and bought new ones until they stumbled—or not—on the desired bill. There was no guarantee. But that didn’t matter, because “people spent their money in the neighborhood anyway, where they could pay for their beer with Knochen instead of DM, it didn’t cost anything more,” the director of the bank explains.

And so began the effective circulation of money. The alternative currency boosted and stimulated business. After seven weeks, it was over. During the auction organized for the closure, the German Museum of History and financial institutes such as the Deutsche Bank were buyers, recalls Chlupka: “Knochen became more and more expensive as art objects.”

On his farm in the countryside, he contemplates a few Knochengeld bills 21 years later. In Prenzlauer Berg, he can no longer use them to pay, as this money has no value there. Such is not the case in the art world, where their negative value has been replaced by a positive that is determined by the art market. One bundle that Chlupka followed on eBay reached the sum of 5,000 euros—and that was two years ago. Blessed is the one who has collected Knochen. For Knochengeld doesn’t smell either.

Stephanie Reisinger
published in MCD #76, “Changer l’argent”, déc. 2014 / févr. 2015

Stephanie Reisinger is a German journalist. Her themes are Scandinavia with focus on family policy and war Children and Local, she worked as a reporter in Berlin and Brandenburg.

The Reflection of the Material Human Community of the Internet

Upon closer inspection, bitcoin reveals itself to be asking all the right revolutionary questions. The first one being: what is the relationship of currency to value, and currency to technology?

Bitcoin is the real currency of an imaginary community: the community of the Internet. Although bitcoin itself came into existence years earlier, the moment where bitcoin was propelled onto the historical stage was when Wikileaks found that its donations from Paypal and Visa were being blockaded on dubious legal grounds by the United States. Given the imperial hegemony of the United States, only a money without a state could save Wikileaks. Yet hitherto all currencies were printed using a state-controlled presses. This is precisely what bitcoin offered: a currency where the production of currency was decentralized in a peer-to-peer network shared via the Internet. Inflation is kept under control by a single decentralized ledge of all transactions, the blockchain. As a currency without borders, bitcoin appeared to Internet activists as manna from the Internet–a currency fit for the new revolutionary generation.

Is there a bitcoin community?

Yet if the power of bitcoin derives from the community, who is this community? Only actually existing bitcoin users? All Internet users? Since only 40% of the world even has Internet access, perhaps the community of bitcoin is the hypothetical community of all those who could have Internet access–the community of humanity itself? This brings us back in a full historical circle to a long-forgotten term, Gemeinwesen, the material humanity community: “Since the essence of man is the true community of man, men, by activating their own essence create this human community (Gemeinwesen),” writes Karl Marx (1).

This selfsame revolutionary imagination is shared by some bitcoin advocates; in their free association and activity, humans can reach our full potential–our species-being–unfettered by the chains of the modern nation-state and capitalism. However, there is a irreducible conflict between Marx and bitcoin, as bitcoin–and most Internet activists–demand for the state to be abolished without demanding the end of capitalism. For Marx, under capitalism humans “exist solely as reified for one another, something which is finally developed solely in the money relation, where their community (Gemeinwesen) appears as an external and therefore accidental thing opposite them” (2). The universal human community under capitalism is the global market where we only know each other through currency-based exchange–which for Marx, unlike Hayek, a perversion.

Is bitcoin a mere currency?

Is bitcoin merely the idea of the universal community of the Internet, presented back in an estranged form as a mere currency? While the concept of a national currency produced by a central bank is undermined by bitcoin, the concept of abstract value which is represented by any currency is never questioned. It is precisely this lack of questioning of abstract value that leads bitcoin to be a haven of free-market zealots with their quixotic Physciocratic attempt to return value to some mythical origin like the gold standard. Bitcoin serves as the new gold of the Net, suitably produced by a new kind of act called in Bitcoin “mining.”

While gold is limited by its rarity and finite supply, the value of bitcoin is set in terms of the amount of computing power available in the world at any given time. The crucial magical transformation of computational processing power into abstract value is given by the running of crytographic hash function over and over again to create new blocks in the blockchain.

This hash function is the great unrevealed mystery of bitcoin, and a refutation of Marx’s theory of value, for there is no real use-value lying hidden beneath the exchange value of bitcoin due to the senseless cryptographic proof-of-work that defines the blockchain. The fetishistic nature of bitcoin reveals itself in all the arbitrary numbers embedded in its design, such as the arcane formula used to calculate transaction fees–not to mention the fact that the total amount of bitcoin is limited to 21 millions, as well as the curious language that has developed around its users: ATH (All-time-high), To the Moon! The only difference between medieval theology and bitcoinis that today a mystified algorithm reigns in place of God.

Although bitcoin’s ability to be used as a currency to exchange commodities is merely a side effect of its production of cryptographically-verifiable currency–global capitalism is already busy recuperating bitcoin; the primary use of bitcoin is not to purchase illegal items via sites such as Silk Road, but is to avoid currency controls as well as a speculative market for hedge funds. Given that bitcoin is literally unhinged from any material world except the size of its user community and processing power, bitcoin is the ideal commodity for speculative capitalism since its value can not readily be predicted, detached as it is from any “use value.”

This is also the saving grace of bitcoin, for bitcoin is also an engineering project and may be forked into a million digital currencies for a million communities: from the serious (failed) attempt to replace domain names (such as « http://www.example.org/ ») with NameCoin to the absurd dogecoin for the community of Shiba-meme enthusiasts. Upon closer inspection, bitcoin reveals itself to be asking all the right revolutionary questions. The first question is what is the relationship of currency to value, and currency to technology? Due to the ontological transformations engendered by the rise of the Internet, the ontological categories posed–and worse, naturalized–by economics must be pulled through the lens of the Internet and thought anew.

How can decentralization work?

Bitcoin also answers a question that is of use to potential revolutionaries from Tahrir to #Occupy. How can decentralization work in a community where there is the possibility people try to cheat? The ingenious engineering solution of bitcoin to prevent people from simply “inventing bitcoin” could be applied to many more sensible problems than that of pure fiscal speculation. In detail, bitcoin features a distributed ledger (the blockchain), where each bitcoin user becomes the bank, just as Indymedia asked people a generation to be the media at the turn of the millennium.

The blockchain is decentralized since each bitcoin user has a copy of the entire ledger. Without relying on a central authority like a bank, a community-wide voting algorithm then determines by majority consensus of who is assigned what particular bitcoins, and this continual voting prevents its members from lying about who has transferred which bitcoin to who–as well as the owners of new bitcoins produced by mining! The “proof-of-work” of cryptographic hashing could be replaced by almost anything, by any measure of things that has to be verified in a decentralized manner.

There is much that can be said for the utility of some form of decentralized accounting that does not rely on a central authority. It is precisely this kind of practical engineering that needs to return to the all-too-useless posturing that disguises itself as revolutionary thought today, lest future revolutions end in failure.

In one of his last works, Amadeo Bordiga forcefully reminds us that goal of the revolutionary party has never been the expansion of a centralized state such as the Soviet Union into all aspects of life as done by Stalin, who Bordiga was the last to spit upon and survive (3). The historical task of the party is to transmit the invariant idea that communism is the realization of material human community: “The revolutionary militant is… one who sees and mingles himself in the whole of the millenary space that binds the ancestral, tribal man, fighter against wild beasts, with the member of the future community, fraternal in the joyous social harmony.” (Bordiga, 1965)

Can the Internet be a material human community?

Today we find that the vision of a world free of domination and exploitation still speaks to today’s young revolutionaries, even though communism as an idea is wholly discredited. The vision of a world in which each can realize their own full potential through decentralized networks of association no longer speaks through the voice of the party, but through the myriad youth who are meeting each other over the Internet. Inheritors of a broken capitalism, they find themselves speaking the same strange language: Of dignity, of revolution, but also of lulzcats and Bitcoin. Can the Internet be a material human community? Any programmer would know the right answer. The material human community does not exist. It must be built.

Harry Halpin
published in MCD #76, “Changer l’argent”, déc. 2014 / févr. 2015

Harry Halpin is a research scientist at MIT and visiting researcher at IRI/Centre Pompidou. He was convinced by Ben Laurie that bitcoins were a scam but now understands greed overpowers reason.

(1) Marx, Karl (1992). Early Writings. New York: Penguin. pp. 265-6.
(2) Marx, Karl (1980). Ökonomische Manuskripte und Schriften, 1858–1861. Vol. 2 of Gesam-tausgabe 2. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, p. 53.
(3) Bordiga, Amadeo (1965). Considerations on the party’s organic activity when the general situation is historically unfavourable:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/bordiga/works/1965/consider.htm

 

 

 

journey to the heart of an ocean of sound

Initially, as a particular field in sound production, field recording was the result of a scientific and technological approach aimed at collecting the sounds of the world before becoming an aesthetic and artistic practice that started to use these very sounds as creative material. Over time, both approaches have reintroduced the noises of the world at the centre of creation. The publication of Field Recordings, l’usage sonore du monde (field recordings, the sonic use of the world) by Le Mot et le Reste editions was an opportunity to reflect upon what it has been customary to call (since the birth of Musique Concrete in the 50s, ambient music in the 70’s, hip hop and the appearance of the sampler in the 90s) the « Art of Field Recording ».

The Field Recording practice, as literally “recording in a field » appeared at the end of the 19th century thanks to the implementation of the first operational and portable sound recording devices. The major names in contemporary Field Recording – Chris Watson (former-Cabaret Voltaire), Geir Jenssen (aka Biosphere), the Touch label, Yann Paranthoën, Henri Pousseur, Lionel Marchetti or the late Luc Ferrari – are, and were, the heirs of emblematic pioneers such as Nicolas Bouvier, a Swiss writer, photographer, iconographer and traveller.

Equipped with his antiquated Nagra, one of the first tape recorders invented by Stefan Kudelski, throughout his life Bouvier explored the world’s roads, especially in Iran and Pakistan. He notably recorded Persians and Gypsies instruments and vocals in the Middle East. As such, he belongs to this category of travelling researchers, anthropologists, sociologists, audio-naturalists and ethnomusicologists, scientific and music lovers, who recorded sounds for heritage archiving purposed, forever curious, struggling against oblivion and ignorance.

Some researchers are passionate about the singing of the lyre bird in Australia others about the melodies of the Solomon Islanders, whilst others still are focusing on the noise of the city or the exalted complaints of prisoners from North American jails. From the outset, Field Recording was as extensive operating area which consisted in  rich and varied challenges and purposes. On this subject, the book by Alexander Galand, Field Recordings, l’usage sonore du monde en 100 albums (field recordings, the sonic use of the world through 100 albums), is a well of knowledge. The author – rightly – insists on the  scientific/artistic dichotomy, which turns out to be complementary over time. Comprising a long historiographical essay, three interviews (Jean C. Roché, Bernard Lortat Jacob and Peter Cusack) and a solid discography, this book is a first of his kind in French and an excellent introduction for the amateur wishing to dive into this ocean of sounds.

The technical origins of an art practice

Whether it be sound techniques or studies, collections used as archives or testimony of the anthropological heritage, initially field recording specifically used a scientific approach. In the beginning at least, the practice of field recording involved an important part of research: whether to investigate the nature of sounds, to collect sound curiosities or more specifically to test new techniques and recording equipment. From this point of view, these techniques and their evolution obviously had a lot to do with the birth of an art which was yet to rise at the time.

In 1876 Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, managing to transform the sound into an electrical signal. A year later, Thomas Edison was declared to be the « inventor of the phonograph » (although in reality he was just quicker at filing a patent of his in invention than his French competitor Charles Cros). This major invention marked the beginning of an era where reproduction of natural sounds (even as a series) had become possible. The phonograph was the first device to play sounds. Users then spoke into a metal horn, while operating a needle which engraved the pattern of the waves caused thereby onto a rotating cylinder covered with a sheet of tin that could then be payed back. This did not prove very malleable and was quickly replaced by a wax film.

Finally the acetate appeared and was used with the gramophone of Emile Berliner, inventor of the process. Nevertheless, Industrial production was laborious and only truly started in 1889. For his part, the Danish Valdemar Poulsen, following the discoveries of the German Heinrich Hertz on electromagnetic waves in 1887, invented a form of magnetic recording on a flexible wire in 1898. But the German chemical company BASF managed to store sounds on a « wire » recorder from 1930. This technique improved with the advent of the pre-magnetised tape provided by the same company (which incidentally was to be used a lot by the Nazi regime).

From Field Recordings to the soundscape

As we can see, since its inception, the art of Field Recording has relied on the constant technological evolution. The « audio-naturalists, » (name then given to the pioneers who practiced this type of research), could only use the available means, always seeking higher quality, portability and accessibility. This singled out several categories of practices and several approaches within Field Recording.

Some practitioners opted for rough, in situ, audio recordings in nature, choosing not to exclude « parasite sounds » and other natural sounds that surrounded the subject and observer. This is a well known problem faced by lovers of songs and animal sounds, as well as those who record and archive ethnographic sounds (the « natives » of various regions of the world, prisoners’ songs, sailors, bluesmen, folk songs and instruments) or naturalistic sounds.

Such a problem is inherent to the sound environment induces different approaches. Some prefer to isolate the recorded object, which requires access to a studio. This is where electroacoustics and sound processing come in. With the widespread production and reproduction tools (the gramophone, the phonograph and then the tape recorder) came the era of the acoustic, electroacoustic and acousmatic experience. The initial and basic field recording turned into « acoustic ecology », « landscape of sounds », « cinema for the ear » or « microphony », sometimes reproduced and « tweaked » in the studio. With the rise and accessibility of the home studio, these practices started spreading and gaining importance. Technically, everything is good to turn the world into an ocean sounds. The art of Field Recording is a quasi-infinite audio exploration of the world.

Soundind the world

The Field Recording practice really took a different turn in the 50s. In the footsteps of the great discoveries of contemporary music: from Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg and Anton Webern’s serialism to Musique Concrète, conceptualised by the French Pierre Schaeffer and electronic music as represented by the German Karlheinz Stockhausen, the approach evolved. In this regard, it is important to note the fundamental theoretical contribution of Pierre Schaeffer and Musique Concrète to the aesthetic and creative evolution and approach taken by Field Recording. If music history is inevitably linked to the history of technology, then Pierre Schaeffer was a true pioneer.

From 1948, the French man founded the Groupe de Recherches de Musique Concrete. It started as a simple radio recording studio but then actively took part in the development of a new form of music: a « concrete » music which he later renamed « electroacoustic » music. Schaeffer was one of the first to dare to master the art of manipulating sounds with the emerging technology of the early tape recorders. After much trial and error, he elaborated a theory that involved challenging the notions of « music », listening, timbre and sound. He wrote these ideas in his Traité des objets musicaux (treatise on musical objects), in 1966. Following the lessons taught in this clear and founding text, composers started to try new experiences.

In the domain of Field Recording another French composer, Luc Ferrari, stood out even more, using the electroacoustic manipulation of sound and recordings and calling it « anecdotal » because their mundane and daily life qualities. With Schaeffer, Ferrari and later other composers like Michel Chion or Lionel Marchetti, it is indeed truly the sounds of the world, of the whole world, urban sounds, domestic sounds, tiny or supposedly « uninteresting » sounds that entered the scope of musical creation.

Field Recording and sample art: an aesthetic (r)evolution

Today more than ever, the Field Recording practice is at the heart of sound creation. From the ambient music invented in the ’70s by Brian Eno to techno and via experimental projects by various artists and musicians from the above-mentioned scenes, the Field Recording practice responds to a multiplicity of genres, approaches and trends. Ambient music, for example, was conceptualised by chance by the British musician Brian Eno when lying in bed he played an LP at the wrong speed.This micro-event was to give him the idea of an « ambient » or “wallpaper” music, which initially did not meet any of the (admittedly very free) requirements of Field Recording. It was techno musicians such as the English of The Orb, or the more industrial Cabaret Voltaire, 23 Skidoo and other bands who blended together relatively slow rhythms with sound recordings, dialogues, sounds of wind and waves for some or urban cacophony and information flows for others.

The emergence of noise in pop music, which dates back to the Beatles and the Beach Boys, became widespread through techno. In the 90s, artists from this scene were inspired both by Schaeffer’s Musique Concrète and urban or natural soundscapes from the ambient music forefathers to create their own sonic universe. This is the case for Geir Jenssen (aka Biosphere) who with a handful of truly unforgettable albums set up the basis for a unique genre, almost single-handedly creating a music school. In addition, former artists from the industrial or techno scenes, such as former-Cabaret Voltaire’s Chris Watson fully embraced this art-form, quickly making a name for themselves in this marginal field. Meanwhile, numerous major artists have tried this genre, providing the listener with pure Field Recordings records as is the case with Moondog, Yann Paranthoën, Jana Winderen or Peter Cusack. They, too, followed the footsteps of great pioneers such as Luc Ferrari, Henri Pousseur, Steve Reich or Alvin Lucier.

From its worldview, its freedom, the multiplicity of its related practices, the ongoing active evolution of means of recording the world around us, exploring « micro” and “infra” sounds, the different goals pursued by artists specialised in it, Field Recording still has a bright future ahead. Like the productions it offers, it continues to be a window looking out onto the world and creation.

Maxence Grugier
published in MCD #70, “Echo / System : music and sound art”, march / may 2013

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