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 exploitation of flags of convenience as legal loopholes in the high seas.
The Great Offshore is co-produced by RYBN and m-cult in context of the European Media Art Platform EMAP's residency programme. Results of the 4-year programme will be presented at the move to... festival hosted by Werkleitz over three weekends in June and in September at Ars Electronica.