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Do NFTs merely privatize ideas to generate profit? Or can they open up other pathways to political participation? Lee Tzu-Tung digs into these questions throughout her multifaceted practice – which spans visual art installations, workshops, and socially-engaged initiatives that creatively harness technology and artistic narrative-craft. Based between Chicago and Taipei, Tzu-Tung’s work grapples with Taiwan’s complex political landscape – with particular attention to women, queer communities, and indigenous movements.

From building a “bionic cryptocurrency” raising awareness of HIV to (speculatively) fractionalizing ownership of several milliliters of the South China Sea, Tzu-Tung has explored the manifold ways that artworks using blockchains and market design as a medium can be a lever for a plurality of political positions. “The most important thing about a technology is being accessible to different people with different abilities,” Tzu-Tung observes, expounding on the design challenges that still need to be overcome if blockchain can reach its fullest potential as a tool for decentralized organizing, especially at the global scale.

In this conversation, she also explains how her practice is one of “prolonged undercover performance art”, reflects on the limitations of NFTs as they currently stand, and discusses the origin of her interest in art that plays with markets – owing to the myth of a magical mountain in Taiwan where semiconductors are manufactured. If one thread can be said to unify Tzu-Tung’s wide-ranging practice, it’s an emphatic belief that the future is open-source.

Seed Phrase is a project by Simon Denny for THE NEW INSTITUTE. This conversation was recorded in Berlin at Studio Jot, edited in Hamburg by fx:one, and made possible by Georg Diez, Lieke Fröberg, and Alice Gustson and The New Institute, with research and additional support by Adina Glickstein. The music for this podcast is by Amnesia Scanner, from their Web3 project SCAMMER, which was released as a series of NFTs.