Hello World

I work as technical consultant, research strategy designer and project developer. To contact me for speaking engagement or any other inquiry, please contact me via [this form], as other channels won’t reach me easily. You can find a list of my verified social media accounts on keybase. Events, appearances and involvements can be found on the RIAT github archive, and my CV can be found here.

RIAT Institute

I am directing RIAT, an independent research and development organisation thematizing the future of decentralisation and fostering the adoption of cryptography and privacy technology across disciplines. We work with cryptocurrency (bitcoin) since 2010 and foster a large international network around the globe. We are chain-agnostic, although my personal interest lies in ‘fully decentralised systems’. RIAT is looking at the challenges and limitations of distributed systems by investigating future cryptoeconomics, code governance, and cryptopolitics. RIAT consists of a network of researchers, developers, entrepreneurs and experimentalists working on conceptualizing, research design, project development and mentoring on future topics of decentralization.

Open Source, Open Hardware

I am an enthusiast for Open Source projects and I am board member of the OSHWA - the Open Source Hardware Association. I am facilitating open hardware projects, such as in the past the Apertus Open Source Cinema Camera and the Monero Open Hardware Wallet. I am actively working with and contributing to open source projects, and I am observing goverance of distributed open source projects. The book Openism: Conversations on Open Hardware empathized the situation, that a lot of open hardware and DIY projects are working above industry standard and are the true driving forces of disruptive innovation, often trough reverse engineering or or radical open source strategies.

History

I have a background as digital bricoleur and in computer science, and developed projects on the intersections of design and experimental technology since the last millennium. I worked with open source projects since my early childhood and I am an autodidact in many technological domains. I am a professional writer, technology communicator, educator and project developer.

I was a professional computer game tester and reviewer from 1986-1992. Later i studied computer science and received my diploma in ‘digital arts and media arts’ at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, Austria with Peter Weibel and Karel Dudesek. After different ventures and startups I founded in the early 2000s (in the fields of big data, noSQL, machine learning and distributed systems) I started the Coded Cultures initiative, a research platform to bring hacker culture and technology-based arts closer together. This resulted in the Coded Cultures Festival which was running from 2004-2016 and was showcased in Austria, Germany and Japan.

In 2010 I co-founded the Artistic Bokeh group, a taskforce for DSLR video hacks and radical media arts. I developed the first bitcoin-based artwork, bitcoincloud (2010), which had its first public appearance in 2011 as part of the “Art and Capital” exhibition at the Künstlerhaus Vienna. Bitcoincloud was maybe the most inefficient Bitcoin Mining rig, as it only mined when visitors were watching the artpiece, in order to thematize the “attention economy”. In 2012 it was touring around the world on different locations.

In 2012 I received a three year research grant from the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) and set up the Artistic Technology Lab at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. There i started the Experiments in Art and Value series, with “Blockchain Performance” (2012), a co-production of Artistic Bokeh & Spacebank (Fran Ilich) in which 20 Ai Weiwei Sunflower Seeds have been purchased with Bitcoin and Artistic Bokeh & Société Réaliste: “Too much money” (2014). Also in 2014 i wrote the paper “Cryptocurrencies as distributed community experiments”, as a chapter for the Handbook of Digital Currency - Bitcoin, Financial Instruments and Big Data.

From 2014 onwards i only worked and researched on decentralisation and different blockchain technologies, and also coordinated the Apertus Open Source Cinema EU Horizon2020 project. Since 2015 I am working on the RIAT research agenda and coordinate technological research and development with my international team. I am currently responsible for the research design and for the long term strategy at the RIAT Institute and I am active as serial entrepreneur and project coordinator.