HFBK

Program

• 5 p.m.
  Introduction Johannes Buettner (Artist, Candidate for PhD in Art Practice)
• 5:10 p.m.
  Samwel Ntapanta and Steffen Koehn
• 5:30 p.m.
  Screening Proof of Work, Film by Samwel Moses Ntapanta und Steffen Köhn, English (25 mins)
• 6 p.m.
  Lene Vollhardt, Swirls of Fortune, English (13 min) and Protocol Time, English (15 min)
• 6:30 p.m.
  Roundtable about research methods

Cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies are deeply entangled with utopian narratives and ideologies. Their promises extend far beyond the realm of technology, carrying with them a critique of established power structures and a vision for alternative forms of organization. Emerging from anti-establishment and counter-hegemonic imaginaries, these technologies do not merely produce financial tools — they shape communities, social orders, and speculative models of governance.

At their core lies often a quasi-religious moment of awakening (Orange pilling) a conversion experience through which individuals come to see the world anew, illuminated by the revelation of a different economic and political order.

This event approaches these technologies of the imaginations through two artist-researcher perspectives that explore how technological infrastructures generate new mythologies, spiritual affects, and forms of collective imagination.

Lene Vollhardt presents Swirls of Fortune (2025), a short musical sci-fi set in the metastable universe of The Sphere and guided by the entity Swirl. Combining cybernetic clowns, NPC choreographies and cascading financial scenes, the film experiments with economies as swirling, recursive systems rather than linear pipelines of extraction. Drawing on her work as co-director of The Sphere, Vollhardt situates the film alongside the project’s protocol design — from Proof-of-Celebration and karmic objects to the Anarchiving Game — to consider how (crypto-)currencies might be repurposed as media of collective memory, celebration and reflexive value—rather than instruments of pure accumulation.

Samwel Moses Ntapanta and Steffen Köhn speak about their research on cryptocurrencies in the Global South, conducted at the Department of Visual Anthropology at Aarhus University. Using the film Proof of Work — created in collaboration with artist and PhD candidate Johannes Büttner in Kenya — they explore how Bitcoin operates as both a technological infrastructure and an ideological project.

Proof of Work follows Kenyan Bitcoin advocates Felix and Martin on their mission to promote the cryptocurrency in Nairobi. Inspired by Bitcoin maximalists from the U.S. and Europe, they aim to onboard 100 businesses, Uber drivers, and Pentecostal churches to accept Bitcoin within one year — a first step toward their vision of a fully decentralized economy.

About the participants

Johannes Buettner negotiates present and past, speculative as well as science-based socio-economic topics. Thereby he thinks about the future in all its potentialities, but with an awareness of planetary crises.

He finds inspiration and sources in current and past counter-culture, political manifestos, the cyberpunk genre, DIY-YouTube-tutorials, and also in spiritualism and (urban-) mythes. These are all seen as prisms through which to investigate larger claims surrounding the conditions of ideology and belief. He is currently a PhD candidate at HFBK.

Steffen Koehn is a filmmaker, video artist, and associate professor of visual and multimodal anthropology at Aarhus University who works at the intersection of cinema, contemporary art, and ethnographic research.

He engages in local collaborations, for example, with gig workers, software developers, or science fiction writers, to explore viable alternatives to current distributions of technological access and power arrangements.

Samwel Moses Ntapanta is an ethnographer of contemporary urbanism along the western Indian Ocean coast (East Africa), particularly on coloniality, consumption and discarding, debris of late capitalism, repairing and recycling economies and money. He is the author of: Gathering Electronic Waste in Tanzania: Labor, Value, and Toxicity,

Lene Vollhardt is an artist and performer working between London and Berlin. Her short film Swirls of Fortune (2024) premiered at Funding the Commons and anchors The Sphere DAO’s Proof-of-Celebration cycle. Through film and performance, she choreographs systems of belief and exchange, exploring ritual, value, grief, and decentralized imaginaries.