Artist*­ Led Economy: Basic Income and the Case for a Freed Future

Thomas Kern is co-instigator of The Accountability Institute. He is a speaker, facilitator, permaculture activist, and community event-maker. Thomas coinstigates The Accountability Institute to push forward accounting education in creative and dynamic ways. Thomas has held positions in financial accounting across Australia, New Zealand and Germany. He was Head of the IFRS (International Financial Reporting Standards) Competence Centre of an international commercial bank based in Hamburg, Germany, and taught at the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management.

David Pledger is a contemporary artist working within and between the performing, visual and media arts in Australia, Asia and Europe. He studied politics and cinema at Monash University where he also took an MA in Asian Studies. He is an acting graduate from the National Institute of Dramatic Art and recently completed a PhD in the Spatial Information Architecture Lab, School of Architecture and Design, RMIT University, Melbourne. He regularly comments on matters of artistic practice, cultural policy, arts activism and the artist’s relationship to society

Charmaine Crowe is a Senior Advisor at the Australian Council of Social Service, leading the organisation’s work across social security policy. Charmaine is directing the campaign to increase unemployment and student payments at ACOSS (Raise the Rate) and gained her expertise in social security policy as Policy Coordinator for Combined Pensioners and Superannuants Association (CPSA). She has also worked as a legislative advisor in the NSW Parliament. Charmaine has a Master’s in International Health and Welfare Policy from Oslo University College and her policy expertise also covers the areas of ageing, health and housing.

Loriana Luccioni is a PhD student at The University of Queensland. After completing degrees in Psychology and Sociology, Loriana has graduated with a Master of Science in European and Comparative Social Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her dissertation, which explored Discourse and the construction of Human Needs in Social Policies, was awarded the 2013 Titmuss Prize. Following a brief collaboration as independent postgraduate researcher with the Policy Innovation Hub at Griffith University, she is now investigating the Cultural and Political feasibility for the implementation of a UBI in Australia. She also co-coordinates the Universal Basic Income Hub in the New Economy Network Australia. Her areas of expertise are Social Policy, Discourse PEOPLE Her work applies somatic, psychospatial and socio-political ideas to experimental live art processes. Trained for 12 years at the Chandrabhanu Bharatalaya Academy, she is currently undertaking her Masters in Therapeutic Arts Practice at the Melbourne Institute of Experiential and Creative Art Therapy. Dr Rebecca Conroy is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher working across site, community engagement, and performative interventions through artist led activity. Her work is bound up in mimetic strategies and the playful occupation of non-art fields such as urban planning, economics, and housing, particularly where it concerns the behavior of cities and the rise of the creative entrepreneur within finance capitalism. Dr Vivian Gerrand is a Research fellow at the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University, where she coordinates the AVERT (Addressing Violent Extremism and Radicalisation to Terrorism). network. In 2017-18, Vivian was an Endeavour and a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute. She is currently researching young people’s use of online image-making to build resilience to violent extremism. Dr Yoni Molad (Phd Philosophy, MA Philosophy/Social Theory; BA (Hons)) is a Philosophical Counsellor and independent scholar whos practice Theory, Discourse and Social Change, Universal Basic Income.

Greg Marston is a Professor of Social Policy and Deputy Executive Dean of Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at The University of Queensland. He is co-coordinator of Basic Income Guarantee Australia. Prior to entering academia Greg worked in the non-profit sector at the local, state and national level. His research interests include poverty and unemployment, technology and work, and social service delivery models. His most recent books are a co-edited collection on Basic Income in Australia and New Zealand (2016); Work and the Welfare State: Street-Level Organizations and Workfare Politics (2013); and The Australian Welfare State: Who Benefits Now (2013).

Rebecca Conroy is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher working across site, community engagement, and performative interventions through artist led activity. Her work is bound up in mimetic strategies and the playful occupation of non-art fields such as urban planning, economics, and housing, particularly where it concerns the behavior of cities and the rise of the creative entrepreneur within finance capitalism.

Nat Grant is a composer and sound artist working across live performance, installation, and sound design: a percussionist and drummer who creates devised, notated, electroacoustic, and improvised works for recordings and live performance. Nat has created original music for theatre, dance, film, and live art, holds a PhD in composition from the Victorian College of the Arts, and in 2018 was the winner of The Age Music Victoria award for Best Experimental/Avant-Garde Act.

Nick McGuigan works as an Innovator, Instigator and Disruptor in Monash Business School to create future-oriented business education programs that focus on innovation, creativity and design thinking. He has a particular passion for accountability where he co-instigated The Accountability Institute - a progressive platform with an aim of fostering collaborations between art, science, technology and economics, bringing these fields into conversation to create a new language of accountability.

Vivian Gerrand is a Research fellow at the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University, where she coordinates the AVERT (Addressing Violent Extremism and Radicalisation to Terrorism). network. In 2017-18, Vivian was an Endeavour and a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute. She is currently researching young people’s use of online image-making to build resilience to violent extremism.

Nithya Iyer is a Melbourne-based arts-researcher, writer and performer. Her work applies somatic, psychospatial and socio-political ideas to experimental live art processes. Trained for 12 years at the Chandrabhanu Bharatalaya Academy, she is currently undertaking her Masters in Therapeutic Arts Practice at the Melbourne Institute of Experiential and Creative Art Therapy

Yoni Molad (Phd Philosophy, MA Philosophy/Social Theory; BA (Hons)) is a Philosophical Counsellor and independent scholar whos practice has developed out of the tradition of therapeutic philosophy, which aims to examine important life situations and dilemmas through dialogue and questioning.

Citizen Coombs (Antoinette J. Citizen + Courtney Coombs) are independent artists in their own rights, who – since their days as undergraduate students – have been friends and occasional artistic collaborators. While their individual practices respectively focus on ideas relating to technology and in negotiating patriarchal, heteronormative society, their collaborative relationship often centres on ideas of conversation and communication as a means to overcome their physical distance. Frequently, humour is employed as a strategy with which to earnestly engage with more serious or subversive ideas relating to their own positions as early-career artists, and to the practice art-making as a legitimate form of labour.

Devika BilimoriaPracticing in Naarm, Devika Bilimoria engages performance, image-making and installation to explore notions of queering, materiality and apertures of the porous body. Devika engages methods of chance, participation and listening to reveal socio-cultural formations of separateness, hierarchies and gestures that arise across territorial conditions and experiences of diasporic South-Asian dance and ritual. In 2022, Devika received their Honours in Fine Arts at the VCA and was a recipient of the Rodger Davies Award. Devika has presented work at the National Portrait Gallery, the Monash Gallery of Art, Montsalvat Gallery, F.S. Meyer Gallery, SEVENTH gallery and Dancehouse.

Amy Hanley is a sound artist and researcher based in Birrarung-ga (Melbourne). Their practice-based research considers relations of space, bodies, technology and contemporary ecologies. Engaging forms of performance, installation, and collaboration, their work often explores gender, sexuality and queer expression/s. Hanley’s practice is interested in listening as an affective practice and the possibilities of sound as a communicator for matter-cultural gestures between human and nonhuman bodies. They currently work as a sessional tutor at RMIT University’s School of Media and Communication. Hanley was an artist in residence at Bogong Centre for Sound Culture (2020) and was the recipient of the Hearsay International Audio Arts Festival, Best Sound Art Award 2019 (IRE). They have featured work at PEOPLE PEOPLE Screen & Sound Cultures Eco_Media Symposium (2019), Falls Festival (2019), A Night at the Nicholas (2019), Hearsay International Audio Arts Festival (2019), The Black Box Theatre (2018), Mapping Melbourne (2018), The Design Hub (2017), Crack Theatre Festival (2016), Melbourne Meat Markets (2016), 107 Projects (2016) and has been broadcast on Soundproof, ABC Radio National, 3RRR and FBi Radio.

Dario Vacirca creates and facilitates solo and collaborative art projects and programs working across borders, art forms and models of creation. His multiplatform projects bring together artists and non-artists in the creation of aesthetically rich and politically charged interdisciplinary artworks. Dario was Artistic Director of OSCA & Well Productions, designing and directing international touring works and setting up platforms of exchange and collaboration across Oz and elsewhere. He is currently a PhD candidate, undertaking practice led research into modes and methods of critical dreaming, embodied resistance and transformation of geo-politics to geopoetics.

Lucie McIntosh is an artist, curator and writer with a deep commitment to the independent arts community. She is currently a Director and Program Curator of Blindside, an independent, artist–run space based in the City of Melbourne. Lucie’s exhibition and research based practice explores process of signification and, more specifically, in how the process of signification might be made visible through the content of an artwork. Her practice emphasises the inherently plural and personal nature of meaning—reminding us of, and celebrating, our agency in its creation. Lucie is interested in the many ways that ‘the image’ can be expanded and consumed in political and philosophical contexts. Her practice relies on plurality and intertextuality—each artwork compulsively referencing its many varieties of self, content, history and maker.