RYBN.ORG (1999) is an artist collective based in Paris, leading extra-disciplinary investigations on complex systems and phenomena within the realms of economics and cybernetics – high-frequency trading, financial algorithms, flash crashes, market infrastructures, tax avoidance opaque schemes and offshore financial circuits, artificial intelligence, digital labor, etc.
The Great Offshore
The Great Offshore is a long-term research on offshore finance that aims to highlight its inner mechanisms, networks and agents, how it shapes legislations and creates new extra-territorialities. In Halle, RYBN.ORG will exhibit the Algoffshore project, developed during a research residency at m-cult, Helsinki: a series of flowcharts that presents blueprints of fictitious automated systems for tax optimisation and asset management, designed from the perspective of their ultimate beneficiaries. Each system relies on an important documentation, and describes the fundamental mechanisms underlying offshore capitalism:systematic tax avoidance and optimisation, the use of proxies, complex anonymisation processes, transformation of artworks into liquid financial vehicles, citizenship-by-investment programmes for international mobility enhancement, cryptocurrency based money laundering, or the exploitationof flags of convenience as legal loopholes inthehigh seas.
This work was realised within the framework of the European Media Art Platforms (EMAP) programme at m-cult (FI) with support of the Creative Europe Culture Programme of the European Union.