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The Sixth Annual Conference of Network Society| Instantly Reciprocal：The Moments for Cooperative Life

THREE academic panel, ONE live-sound party, ONE blockchain market．ONE preservation of historic township and exhibition on Metaverse／Decentraland.

Time: 2021/12/18-2021/12/19

Venue: Building No.19, 1568 Changyang Rd., Yangpu District, Shanghai.(offline); Zoom and Stream(online).

Zoom（Soon to be Published）

Livestream on Bilibili ｜ Livestream on Youtube ｜ Livestream on Decentraland

Host: Institute of Network Society, School of Intermedia Art, China Academy of Art

Co-organizer: Mask Network, Nervos Network, MetaDao.

INTRODUCTION

According to some technological philosophical ideas, If humans and even the whole world are nothing but consequences of technologies, it is hard to make revolutions without it being concerned. However，physically speaking, consuming natural resources increases the entropy of the place where humans live, leading to nothing but anthropocentrism. Similarly, either to control technologies or being controlled by technologies lead to nothing but dystopia. After all, the physical materials used to produce our technologies are used to produce our social relations as well.

The last 5 annual conferences of network society assessed revolutions and changes happening in our digital lives with scholars all around the world. They witnessed our efforts to make a critique of global innovative technologies as well as the structure of network society in China, to review the former practices made by our institute, and finally, it makes us launch 3 blockchain based social reciprocity experiments about “technology of hope” this year. 

In these experiments, blockchain becomes technology, rather than purpose, of information exchanging based on trusts. We all know that without travellers’ destinations, the high-speed rail network brings no efficiency. In this case, the destination is a “technology of hope”. With the help of it, there comes a decisive moment when the high-speed rails technologies become instantly reciprocated for passengers. Similar moments happened a few times before. Perhaps to the workers living in Moscow at the beginning of the 19th century, the moment happened when they sang together on their way home and felt like a union, or when Robert Owen set out to open the school for children and workers, developed a cooperative economy system in his factory, in 1817. It could also happened when 28 workers pooled 1 pound per person, opened their grocery store(as an early consumer co-operative) with 28 pounds in 1844，later known as the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers；and when student protesters wrote the “It is forbidden to forbid” in the May 68，or, it could happen in 1970-1973，when Chile government launched “Cybersyn” project during the presidency of Salvado Allende.

Spreading knowledge of art and architecture under an innovative co-operative economy, the Institute of Network Society, China Academy of Art, is now producing another technology of hope, making another moment happen. The sixth Annual Conference of Network Society includes no longer keynote speeches based on specific keywords, but comments and questions given and raised to our social reciprocity experiments. Here we sincerely invite all the people interested in our projects to join this two-day conference, sharing the moments you are making and the technologies they are based on, letting the conference become a festival of instant reciprocity where people instantly inspire each other.

Schedule (UTC+8/ Shanghai Time)

December 18（Saturday)

Time
09:10-09:20	Han Min（Vice President at School of Intermedia Art, China Academy of Art）：Opening Speech
09:20-09:30	Prof. Sunquan Huang(Director at the Institute of Network Society, School of Intermedia Art, China Academy of Art): Introduction to the 6th Annual Conference of Network Society
09: 30-12: 30	Panel 1 SparkLink, Shareing NFT of Arts Project Report： Yisi Liu（Mask.io） Guest Commentators： Guo Liu（CTO at Matters Lab）：Constructing Collaborative Ownership Kin Ko（LikeCoin）：The Saam Fuk Pei of Freedom Cameron Hejazi（Cent）：Rethinking social media with NFTs Jon Ippolito（University of Maine）：Crypto-preservation and the ghost of Andy Warhol Roundtable Discussion： Sunquan Huang（INS），Pengan Zhou（INS），SparkLink team，all the panelists.
14:00-17:00	Panel2 Archverse, Restructuring China Country at Metaverse Project Report: Shuxuan Zhang(INS), Mingxuan Xie (Archverse Team) Guest Commentators： Ji Pan（Fudan University）：Simulation City as a Realization of Multiple Communications Jenny Chou（ATLAS）：How to Build a Sustainable Modern Community in an Historical Village  Nova（Cthuwork）：Virtual Architectures in Games Roundtable Discussion： Sunquan Huang（INS），MetaDAO，Archverse team，all the panelists.
Will be Published Soon	Special Event: Archverse Launch Party: Meetverse live show（Artists：Tooto，Bu Zhi Fu） Online Party on the Minsheng Ship, Beibei, Decentraland（Artists：Liquid Farmer / Cephalosis / Yu Tian / jiafeng / Starstar / Neptunian Maximalism）

December 19（Sunday)

Time
20:00-22:40	Panel 3 COOP, A Social Token Brings Us Together Project Report: Sunquan Huang(INS) Guest Commentators: Jack Linchuan Qiu (National University of Singapore) Nathan Schneider(University of Colorado Boulder)：Beyond Cryptoeconomic: Platform Cooperativism and the Future of Blockchain Wong Joon Ian（Founder of ＄JOON）：What I Learned when I minted ＄JOON Roundtable Discussion： Jan Xie（Nervos Network），Baiyu（CryptoC），Han Tang（CryptoC），COOP team，all the panelists.
For the Whole Day	COOP Free Market In addition to the drinks and snacks from COOP Bar, the COOP could also be used to “buy” everything dear from others.

Panel1: Sparklink，Sharing NFT of Arts

In the blueprint of this project, there is a group of people who keep contributing to knowledge archiving. They are friends to either the future and the past, uploading all their beloved publications to the permanent blockchain repositories like Arweave and IPFS. Through minting and transferring NFTs, they distribute knowledge, support content creators and become “Publisher for Public Domain”. SparkLink makes the Publisher for Public Domain an occupation opening to all readers, making reading an approach to publishing. In the future of SparkLink, perhaps in 5000 years, all readers could be sedimentary rocks, telling the height of the intellectual civilization of Homo sapiens.

• Github： https://github.com/SparkNFT
• Sparklink：https://sparklink.io/#/
• Original thought：https://codimd.caa-ins.org/vBffn26KT8KRWHrOGrJ9XA

Panelists:

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Yisi Liu CTO at Dimension.im

Guo Liu Guo is a programmer and creator, he creates software, text, photograph and painting, explores how people relate to each other in a decentralized digital world. Co-founder of Matters Lab, co-founder of Montage Play, previous senior software engineer at Oracle.

Kin Ko As an Earthman, Kin Ko is founder of LikeCoin and ＃decentralizehk, member of Creative Commons. As an entrepreneur, he believes in freedom and democracy, opening and pluralism. Kin Ko got his bachelor degree of Computer Engineering, minoring in Sociology, Politics and Administration, and master degree of Information Technology Management, at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is now teaching “The Sociology of Blockchain” at Minyuan Education, and he is the author of “the Sociology of Blockchain”. His works archived in express.com could also be found at ＃decentralizehk and public medias like Stand News and Matters. Email him: kin@ckxpress.com.

Cameron Hejazi Cameron is a technologist by trade and has been working with the creator economy since 2013. Initially focused on advertising models, he worked with ad exchanges and agencies to help maximize ad revenue for digital creators. When Ethereum emerged, he saw the potential for alternative business models and has been experimenting with these ever since.

Jon Ippolito Jon Ippolito is a new media artist, writer, and curator whose work has been recognized with awards from the Thoma, Tiffany, Lannan, and American Foundations. At the Guggenheim, he curated the first Internet commissions collected by a museum, curated the first art museum exhibition of virtual reality, and co-curated the 2000 Nam June Paik retrospective. Outspoken about the dangers of technological obsolescence and our shrinking public commons, he has published in periodicals ranging from the Art Journal to the Washington Post and chapters in over 20 anthologies. His books include At the Edge of Art (Thames & Hudson 2006) with Joline Blais and Re-collection: Art, New Media, and Social Memory (MIT 2014) with Richard Rinehart. Ippolito is Professor of New Media at the University of Maine, where he directs an all-online graduate Digital Curation program (https://DigitalCuration.UMaine.edu).

Pengan Zhou Pengan is a software engineer, researcher, disseminator of Retrocomputing, and related cultural phenomena. He was active in the Chinese personal digital assistant (PDA) user community when he was a student. He moved to Canada in 2009 and has been participated in many local entrepreneurial projects, thus come into contact with scientific-technological cultural communities such as retro computing, Demoscene, and Chiptune. In 2016, he became the first person to introduce related content in the form of the “Antique Computer Room” in the Zhihu column. through the creation of writing, translation, and online content, promotes the connection between Chinese scientific and technological cultural communities and the world. In 2018, the “dnbwg” was opened, becoming the first online interactive computer museum in the Chinese language world.

errethakbe Student at the School of National Cybersecurity，Wuhan University; Intern at Mask.io；Team member of SparkLink.

Nyk Ma A DevOps curious about all the new things；Team member of SparkLink.

Mengjie Chen Smart Contract Engineer at Mask.io；Team member of SparkLink.

Panel 2: Archverse，Restructuring China Country at Metaverse

This project comes from the work “Beibei”. “Beibei” represents the space of Beibei city in 1930s and 1940s on the metaverse project “Decentraland”; the work was made for the exhibition “Plot the Soil: Reconstructing the Country China”. Although metaverse is widely regarded as a part of “future”, “Beibei ” shows its potential ability to represent the past. Along with Beibei spirit, this year, the Institute of Network Society cooperates with MetaDAO, trying to represent more disappeared or disappearing villages, cities and minority cultural spaces in China. Archverse is not only about creatively archive the space demolished today, but also examines to what extent does the metaverse, in which an “infinite” and “free” future was promised, is able to write liquid histories for the people, when most assets on it are designed from the bottom up and being held for sale. 

• Github：https://github.com/CAAINS/Archverse
• Visit Archverse on Decentraland: https://play.decentraland.org/?position=125%2C-44&realm=fenrir-amber
• Database：https://roamresearch.com/#/app/PlotTheSoil/page/zwaeNb0hG

Panelists

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Shuxuan Zhang Second year at the Master program Production of Spaces and Architecture Media Research, China Academy of Art. Team member of Archverse.

Mingxuan Xie Architecture designer, independent developer and digital artist. Founder at VRCH and member of Hyperbation. Volunteer of Archverse.

Ji Pan Dr. Pan Ji, PHD from the University of South Carolina, Columbia. Currently, he is Professor at Journalism School and research fellow at the Center for Information and Communication Studies in Fudan University. His major research interests include social capital, urban communication and the consequences of digital mediation.

Jenny Chou Born in Taipei , Jenny Chou earned her Architecture degree at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2004, and her master’s degree in Urban Design at Columbia University in 2008. She Co-founded ATLAS in 2015 in Beijing China. Prior to ATLAS she worked with Taiwanese architect Hsieh Ying-chun on a rural China development project. The studio has shown work both in China and internationally, including at the 2018 Venice Biennale of Architecture, the 2016 International Architecture Biennale in Rotterdam. The Dali project is a community development project that ATLAS initiated with the Global Heritage fund in 2016. Since then, the project has developed a woman textile co-op -a community center and a guest house- aiming to support heritage education and creating local economic opportunities at the same time.

www.studio-atlas.com

www.thedaliproject.com

Nova Co-founder at Cthuwork. Nova worked as game planner and the a technical planner at a Chinese top game studio. Now, he is Chairman at the Managment Committee of Cthuwork, which is now the biggest content creating community all around the Asia. Last 9 years, Nova helped to create most of the systems of communities, of training of Cthuwork, as well as an assessment standard of this project. The members of Cthuwork are distributed throughout the world. The loose but centripetal efficiency system helps the community members collaborate and complete huge-scale world construction and artistic creation. In August 2021, the Rivermen was released and sold out 10,000 in 3 days, and the Cthuwork team becomes the first Chinese team to sell out 10K-level NFT projects on Ethereum.

it has established and participated in and created most of the community systems, training systems and assessment standards of the State Construction. 

Fan Yao Developer at Alibaba Cloud, team member of Archverse

Zimon Chen Virtual human developer, 3D generalist. She graduated from the School of Intermedia Art, China Academy of Art. She is trying to give her characters souls, and trying to make experimental films combining virtual visual images with sound. Her works cover the development of virtual digital humans, CG images, and metaverse development. (weibo:Zi_mon ; instagram:zi_mon310)

Zuiiun Zhu Virtual space developer. She graduated from the School of Intermedia Art, China Academy of ART. Her works include installations, virtual spaces with sounds and landscapes.

Panel 3: COOP, A Social Token Brings Us Together

In this project, the Institute of Network Society issues social token $COOP, trying to make the institute a bottom-up academic cooperative in technology and art. $COOP could be used to “buy” others’ time and work. It is an original currency of INS co-operative. Today, the cooperative economy has become a long-standing contributor and sharing prosperity all over the world. The Japanese Consumer Co-operative Union serves 31% of the nation’s households, 40% of Brazil’s agriculture, and 36% of Denmark’s retail market is made up of cooperatives. Kenya gets 45% of its GDP and New Zealand gets 22% of its GDP from cooperatives. In the United Kingdom, 200,000 people currently work in more than 400 cooperatives. In Germany, Berliners now form utility cooperatives to buy and operate the city’s electricity grid, and there are enough diverse, cross-age and ethnic cooperative housing. And emerging platform cooperatives have already achieved very good results in art, agriculture, transportation, softwares, education, and retail. We believe that blockchain shares the same essence to cooperatives. To turn an upside-down world upside down, cooperatives inspire us more than financial experts do. 

• Github：https://github.com/CAAINS/coop

Panelists

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Sunquan Huang Artist, Curator, professor at China Academy of Art, Director of the Institute of Network Society and the Production of Spaces and Architecture Media Research program.

Jack Linchuan Qiu I grew up in China and lived in California during my PhD studies. Before relocating to Singapore, I was a professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong from 2004 to 2020.I work on issues of digital media and social change in relation to labor, class, globalization, and sustainability, especially in the contexts of Asia and the Global South. I have published more than 100 research articles and chapters and 10 books in both English and Chinese including Goodbye iSlave: A Manifesto for Digital Abolition (U of Illinois Press, 2016), World Factory in the Information Age (Guangxi Normal U Press, 2013), and Working-Class Network Society (MIT Press, 2009). My work has been translated into French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish. ​I am an elected Fellow of the International Communication Association (ICA) and a recipient of the C. Edwin Baker Award for the Advancement of Scholarship on Media, Markets and Democracy. I also serve as the President of the Chinese Communication Association (CCA).

Nathan Schneider Nathan Schneider is an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he leads the Media Enterprise Design Lab. He is the author of Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition that Is Shaping the Next Economy, published by Nation Books, and two previous books, God in Proof: The Story of a Search from the Ancients to the Internet and Thank You, Anarchy: Notes from the Occupy Apocalypse, both published by University of California Press. His articles have appeared in publications including Harper’s, The Nation, The New Republic, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and others, along with regular columns for America, a national Catholic weekly. He has lectured at universities including Columbia, Fordham, Harvard, MIT, NYU, the University of Bologna, and Yale. In 2015, he co-organized “Platform Cooperativism,” a pioneering conference on democratic online platforms at The New School, and co-edited the subsequent book, Ours to Hack and to Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet. Follow his work on social media at @ntnsndr or at his website, nathanschneider.info.

Wong Joon lan Joon Ian Wong is the Founding co-president of the Association of Cryptocurrency Journalists and Researchers. He was formerly a Technology reporter for Quartz in London where his interests included bitcoin, cryptocurrencies and blockchain. He began his career in crypto as one of the earliest reporters at Coindesk, where he helped launch theConsensus event series. He has also held editorial and media roles at Asia tech news platform e27 and the China Economic Review. Joon holds a Bachelor’s degree in Journalism from New York University and a Masters’s in Interactive Media from Goldsmiths College, University of London.

Jan Xie Jan Xie is the architect of Nervos Network and founder of Cryptape. He was a researcher working on Casper and sharding for Eth2.0 in Ethereum research team. He also led the development of the first open-source exchange Peatio, the largest Ethereum mining pool Sparkpool, and the high performance permissioned blockchain CITA. His current research interests include blockchain scalability, smart contract model, cryptoeconomics and mechanism design.

Baiyu（Co-Founder at CryptoC）

Special Event：Archverse Launching Party，“Meetverse”

👋 Join the party！：beibei.city

Meetverse Party, as a side-project of Archverse Beibei, is an online music party that takes place in the Dragon City area of Decentraland.

Unlike conventional “online performances”, the Meetverse Party has a more open mechanism of the sound – it inherits the animal-like ecstasy of the millennial the Wild Great Wall rave party, but does not exclude other musical genres from participating in it to rewrite themselves. And if we subconsciously assume that the sound that emerges from a new technology should be the so-called “more technological” sound, then we are already in the technology’s trap.  How do we use and even cheat this virtual space to make it a better place while it is naturally getting insaner? Just having more music styles is not enough, more urgent thing is that in this online party happened in Decentraland, participants can make random sounds by interacting with each other, and these off-stage sound fragments are simultaneously performed with the music on stage, and are collected by a “total radio” in this universe. Everyone participates in the construction of the “soundscape” of the zone, so the centralization of the right to make sound brought about by the stage is expected to be melted down, and this “soundscape”, together with the liquid historical messages and the rapidly changing technological platform, has become the Meetverse Party’s telescope to look into the past, present and future – Even if our watching is turning into a desperate action due to the speculation of some people on this platform. 

Let me put two quotes here: ” It is only for the sake of those without hope that hope is given to us.”  (Benjamin); “We only wish to have a hope as a revenge.” (Mu Dan) – The Meetverse Party is the MEET of despair and hope, and the “MEET” is an action that is always always always “happening”.

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DJ List

Liquid Farmer （Japanese electronic musician, now lives in Songyang, Zhejiang）In 2020 he moved to Songyang to continue his farming life, making didgeridoo and playing music. The farming life influences the creativity of his music. His live electronic music style includes phy flow, down tempo, deep trance, ambient, progressive, etc. In his electronic music, he will use didgeridoo, shakuhachi, mouth string and other world folk instruments to join in his music.

Cephalosis is a duo from Kunming, China. Li Hao and Hu Jie both like same music, Europe industrial, dark ambient and underground electronic music which make Cephalosis become who it is now. They signed to Ruby Eyes Records in 2017 and put out debut album Voluntary Ambition in January 2019. They followed with Spring Styx in 2020, a more powerful and firmer record than last one. Cephalosis is inactive and obscure, changing in a way they expect.

Yu Tian Experimental musician, lead singer and guitarist of Sweet Child, creator and director of Yao Media Lab, currently an associate professor at the Shanghai Institute of Design, China Academy of Art

Jiafeng Producer/singer-songwriter Jiafeng creates a distinct style of Chinese pop music that provides extreme, playful and nostalgic auditory experience. Being a non-fundamentalist on music genres, he practices on a variety of topics: pop, consumerism, underground electronics, rock throwback, and most importantly – the unique Chinese internet culture. He has collaborated with significant Chinese pop stars such as Da Zhangwei, Zhang Qiang and AKINI JING, and also been involved in the world’s electronic/hyper pop scenes with figures such as Catnapp, Bloodz Boi, felicita, Galen Tipton, Recovery Girl, etc.

Starstar is the moniker of singer/producer Hu Jie, a bedroom electronic pop music project untethered by any genre expectation. In each period her playlist shapes her different senses of music but certain female artists who are talented always influence and encourage her.

Neptunian Maximalism Belgian experimental noise/doom/drone/psychedelic/fusion jazz band Neptunian Maximalism a.k.a. NNMM whose 2020 debut album “Éons” made the annual charts of several media outlets. They call themselves a community of multi “occultural engineers” (*Genesis P-Orridge). This project was initiated by Guillaume Cazalet (CZLT ; SOL KIA ; ZAÄAR) and the veteran saxophonist player Jean Jacques Duerinckx (ZAÄAR ; Ze Zorgs) in Brussels in 2018, especially during a residency with the two drummers Sebastien Schmit (K-Branding) and Pierre Arese (AKSU).

Tooto Too is the “too” of too much. It could be either adj. or adv.; and “Tooto”the “too……to” from “too……to do something”.

Bu Zhi Fu To understand another animal is definitely hard for an animal. Miss Bu Zhi Fu, in her second year of Master at China Academy of Art, hides her tastes in piles of old paper, stirring cute with catastroph. She is good at music-montage, like a wondering alley puppy, pooping rainbows under the poles at the crossroad. Her music list is usually suspicious but not suspended, offering her audiences a happy puffy treat. She is ued to taking performance seriously, to bring audiences happiness with her ernest list!

Initiator: Prof. Sunquan Huang

Facilitator: Duohan Zhang, Earth Zhang

Convenor：Prof. Sunquan Huang

Team: Yu Cui, Danling Xu, Earth Zhang, Tianyu Lou, Zi Fang, Shuxuan Zhang, Jianhua Song, Hongyi Yang, Ruiyun Tang, Genny Zheng, Duohan Zhang, Binfa Sun, Yan Zhu, Archverse Team, COOP Develop Group, SparkLink Develop Group

Two-day ticket to the offline meeting： COOP 0.1