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title: Grayson Earle
Grayson Earle
Grayson Earle’s diverse technological practice is unified by a political approach to media making. Employing video games, video projection, algorithmic audiovisual generation, biological organisms, and robotics, his work tends to intervene on physical spaces and entrenched ideas. His creative practice articulates a repositioning of resistance to power that invites participation from reluctant citizens.
Presenting and Exhibiting
Bail Bloc
Last year I released Bail Bloc, a distributed cryptocurrency mining project that uses the money generated to pay bail for low income people. A New York Times op-ed states that 90% of people who cannot afford bail will take a plea deal, which is a guilty plea without a day in court. Furthermore, the conviction rate for people who can afford to make bail is 50% while people who spend time in pre-trial detention face a 92% conviction rate. Put simply, these people are found guilty of being poor. This effects communities of color in particular, and one can conceptualize of the prison system as a form of currency mining on marginalized people.
If twice as many people could afford to pay bail, the already-impacted courts would have no way of hearing the ensuing cases, as they are premised on the assumption that the majority of people won't take their cases to trial if they cannot afford bail. Bail Bloc opens up the possibility of tipping the scales and letting the courts collapse under their own weight. The project is more valuable than the sum of its hashrate, however, and seeks to open up a dialogue about the need to end the cash bail system.
My talk would include a brief history and description of the project, as well as consideration for the horizon of activism; Given the idea of the Operational Image, that most images created today are not intended for the human eye, art and cultural production must engage in a new modality of moving beyond occupying visual culture, and towards mounting systems as arguments and interventions.