Festivals, Cultural and City Events

Reciprociti exhibition at Art Festival

As part of the Edinburgh Art Festival, Reciprociti explored value, worth and forms of currency in this pop-up exhibition and events space.

Edinburgh College of Art, Saltmarket Design and Design in Action presented a series of exhibits and events to consider these themes and question our own value and worth within the larger systems around us.

Reciprociti

The power of our transactions is often obscured by the systems and shrouded machinations of the financial frameworks in which they are carried out. In Reciprociti Bank, Patrick Stevenson-Keating created a reimagined banking scenario where the motivation behind our spending is questioned and this power of transaction can be harnessed.

Exhibited in the Royal Bank of Scotland building on Princes Street, the bank within a bank supposed new metrics by which we might measure value. To make this re-evaluation, technologies were designed to remove our passivity and provide practical means to make our money count.

These artefacts ranged in form from an ATM which exposes your purchase history and questions the accountability of your accounts to credit cards which let people add positive or negative meta-data to digital payments.

An immersive experience, the technologies and processes in Reciprociti challenged us to consider ideas of worth and value, enabling us to make decisions as to how our own worth can have social influence.

Initiated for the 2014 Design Museum's Designers in Residence programme, Reciprociti came to Scotland on Friday 31st July as part of the Edinburgh Art Festival and ran through to the end of August.

In response to the themes and ideas of the work, Saltmarket Design produced a series of exhibits and events to further consider our own value and worth within the larger systems around us.

Between 1-2pm on 26th August, the Programmable Money Workshop analysed the relationship between network technologies and money by helping parents and children programme rules for imaginary currencies of their own device.

Led by Prof Chris Speed, Centre for Design Informatics, University of Edinburgh, the themes of value and worth were opened up by creative thinking.

Edinburgh College of Art

Reciprociti

Thursday 30 July 2015, 9.30am - Monday 31 August 2015, 5.00pm

Royal Bank of Scotland, 142-144 Princes Street, Edinburgh

Reciprociti on ECA website