ecosXchange:
an idea for a complementary cultural currency was presented at ecos : international convention on eco-creation at Le Corbusier's Unité d'Habitation
in Rezé, Nantes in August 2006.
The currency 'ecosXchange' is conceived as a strategy of extracting the means of cultural production out of processes that have a functioning (not a representational or polemical) relationship to ecology: i.e. creating a system of exchange value between cultural production and ecologic process.
According to the NEF (New Economics Foundation, London), the ecological footprint of post-industrial information-age UK is now 3.1 planet Earths whereas in the high- industrial 1960s it was merely 1 planet. Thus if the whole world consumed on the same level as the average UK citizen,
we would need 3.1 planet Earths.
In comparison, the footprint of France is 3 planets.
The same period since 1960 has seen a generation of radical art and cultural practices rooted in ecological approaches but whilst this has representational value it has no influence on the actual trajectory of social processes and behaviour. With cultural production in the 'advanced economies' this is more so because production of culture however contrary in content is dependent [for its production] on the surplus value of corporate production and state management; thus its 'ecological' use-value is operationally contained within that working relationship.
In this context, ecosXchange proposed a circulatory cultural value, a currency, designed to operate invisibly within a social process, aside from representing symbolically from without.
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