+ – Aude Launay

I am a philosopher focused on the ethics and political philosophy of technology, and web3 in particular. Since 2016, I have been researching distributed decision-making through algorithmic processes and blockchain-based democratic systems. I have also written extensively about and curated art that interferes with the power mechanisms that underpin governance structures.

Recently, my writings have been published in collective works such as Between the Material and the Possible: Infrastructural Re-examination and Speculation in Art (Sternberg Press, 2022), The Great Offshore (UV, 2021) and Art et Argent (Amsterdam Editions, 2021). I am currently at work on a political philosophy book on DAOs and on another one on the reasons why NFTs really matter.

Previous to that, I have been a text worker (editor, translator…), the associate chief editor of the French contemporary art magazine 02 (2011-2016), a founding member of the Belleville Biennale in Paris (2010-2014), an art theory lecturer at an art and design school (2012-2014), a dogsbody at a non-profit art space and a ghostwriter for art history PhDs. In 2018, I was one of the four proto-members of the Decentralized Autonomous Kunstverein — probably the first art DAO —, and in 2019, I have been awarded a research grant by the CNAP to work on the ways artists prototype democratic processes using decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs).

To get in touch, you can email me at my first name followed by my family name at protonmail.com or message me on TW @audelau or on TG @Odd_Name

My research is/has been supported by: The CNAP (the French National Center for Visual Arts); C-E-A (the French Association of Art Curators); Les Tanneries (a beautiful art center nested in the countryside south of Paris) and all the institutions and individuals that find it fair to compensate me when they invite me to give a talk or to publish a text.

Special thanks to Aksioma, Bassam El Baroni, EBB, Furtherfield, Institute of Network Cultures, Nick Koppenhagen, Krystian Woznicki, for repeatedly trusting me and inviting me to take part in their meaningful endeavors, and to my favorite artists and humans for accepting to take part in mine. !Mediengruppe Bitnik, RYBN, Lauren Lee McCarthy, Sam Lavigne, Cassie Thornton, Jonas Lund, Franz Wanner, Julien Prévieux, Zachary Formwalt, Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Navine G. Dossos, James Bridle, Telekommunisten, Christopher Kulendran Thomas & Annika Kuhlmann, you have my admiration.