Anna Lytvynova
WHY LOOK AT TECH HUMANISTICALLY?
"We've heard it, we've all heard all about all the sticks and spears and swords, the things to bash and poke and hit with, the long, hard things, but we have not heard about the thing to put things in, the container for the thing contained. That is a new story. That is news. And yet old."
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- Ursula LeGuin
To make better sticks, and to make better worlds for sticks. Instead of adapting techno-heroic narratives and analysing the ways in which technology changed the world, I look at the ways in which technology and society co-create each other. I look at the containers.
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I am interested in labour and in peer-to-peer financial technology. My research centres on the ways in which new decentralised financial technology evolves as we redefine what it means to work in post-digital societies. I am especially interested in the ways in which this happens in creative industries.
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Below are my current areas of research.
Work & Blockchain
Blockchain in finance promises decentralisation and democratisation. I am less concerned with evaluating the truth of those claims, and more with tracing the kinds of realities such attemps create.
It is not only that technology intervenes in the way we work but that our relationship to money - and to each other - might be changing with new possibilities of peer-to-peer capital.
What does it mean to work in such realities?
Obra anais performance ensemble. Photo: Anthony Kennedy
Gamification of Fianance
Risky trades, fun investments, and glorification of risk - the association of big fun with big money runs from early financial markets to today's cryptocurrency trading.
Is money fun? Or is it only fun for the bad guys? I am interested in the ways in which games, play, and joy are invoked in contemporary financial trading, and what that might tell us about our relationships to capital.
Photo: Michael Greggain
Performativity
Performativity of a phenomenon refers not to that phenomenon being fiction, but it being continuously in making, in development.
I analyse decentralised technology as continuously evolving phenomena that co-create realities alongside (rather than preceding) social practices and meaning.
How does novel technology construct our realities?
Creativiva Worldwide