Habib William Kherbek: Crypto (cult)ures - Metaversus

Workshop II: Metaversus

Monday, March 28, 3 pm
online (link tba)

The second workshop in the series will consider the relationship of emerging Web 3.0 technologies, including the ‘metaverse’ as they relate to contemporary art practices. The workshop, as with the predecessor workshop on NFTs, will consider the technical and historical background of these emerging participatory creative forms, both as part of the lineage of telematic art, but as distinctive concepts in their own right. This session will address topics including distributed autonomous organisations (DAOs), the enclosure of digital space, hybrid metaverse/IRL economies, environmental consequences, and tensions between the rhetoric of inclusiveness and realities. 

Habib William Kherbek is the writer of the novels Ecology of Secrets (Arcadia Missa, 2013) and ULTRALIFE (Arcadia Missa, 2016), New Adventures (left gallery, 2020), and Best Practices (Moist Books, 2021). His video-poem playlist/collection/reading, retrodiction (2016), was released by left gallery. Other poetry collections include Everyday Luxuries (Arcadia Missa, 2018), and 26 Ideologies for Aspiring Ideologists (If a Leaf Falls Press, 2018). Twenty Terrifying Tales from Our Technofeudal Tomorrow, a short story collection, was published by Arcadia Missa in 2021, and Still Dancing, an art book Kherbek curated and contributed images to, was published by TLTR Press in the same year. Abstract Supply (London) will release Kherbek’s collected art writings, entitled Entropia, in 2022. He was the recipient of a research fellowship from the Sandberg Institute in 2020 during which time he wrote Technofeudalism Rising (left gallery, 2021). His writing has appeared in the award-winning Block Magazine, Tank Magazine, Rhizome.org, Berlin Art Link, MAP, Flash Art, Spike Magazine, Sleek, Samizdat, AQNB, and a number of other publications. His Ph.D. is from the University of London, Birkbeck (2014). Kherbek produces music under the name dirtagnan, and oversees a subscription-only fashion project entitled HabibWear.