The development of offshore finance has often been attributed to a dependent and simultaneous development of the World Wide Web based on the early iteration of the web mapped through the global infrastructure of the telegraph, and telecommunication nodes of cable and wireless. As new technologies emerged, telegraph links were upgraded, moving from telephone trunk links to fibre optic cables and submarine networks. This process was was highly intertwined with territorial, military, and economic interests.   Financial firms looking to establish branches and subsidiaries outside sovereign oversight would move offshore jurisdictions to specific locations connected and serviced by this infrastructure, enabling increased mobility, speed, and efficiency. In similar ways the development of offshore data havens for the storage, maintenance, and facilitation of the virtual realities of communications technologies across national jurisdictions, has been enabled by inherited market and economic structures that make land, labor, and legal structures more conducive in a specific country for the establishment of offshore offices or subsidiary operations for large international corporations.   This panel brings together a series of artists, theorists and specialists to discuss the relationship of global infrastructures of the web and finance in the emergence of a culture of the offshore and how this redefined cultural practice in terms of our relationship and autonomy as consumers/produces in a global economy.   Participants:   Deborah Cowen teaches in the Department of Geography at the University of Toronto. Her research explores the role of organized violence in shaping intimacy, space, and citizenship. Deborah is the author of The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade, Military Workfare: The Soldier and Social Citizenship in Canada, co-editor with Emily Gilbert, of War, Citizenship, Territory. Deborah edits the Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation book series at UGA Press, the journal Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, and serves on the board of the Groundswell Community Justice Trust Fund.   Meredith Lackey is a filmmaker and artist, whose research documents the political and economic relationships between business, states and global infrastructure through the laying of fiber optic cables.   Bill Maurer is Dean of Social Science and Professor of Anthropology and Law at the University of California, Irvine. He is a cultural anthropologist who conducts research on law, property, money and finance, focusing on the technological infrastructures and social relations of exchange and payment. He has been involved in curatorial work more directly associated with his research, represented most recently in an ongoing exhibit on the past, present and future of money at the British Museum. More information can be found at http://faculty.sites.uci.edu/wmmaurer/ Yuri Pattison is an Irish multimedia artist based in London who studies ways in which the virtual world permeates material reality. Mastering a huge variety of media, his work often uses different devices to explore the strengths and limits of digital communication. Pattison is the current recipient of the Chisenhale Gallery Create Residency 2014-16.Recent solo exhibitions include 'Free Traveller', Cell Projects, London (2014); 'Colocation, Time Displacement', Minibar, Stockholm, Sweden (2014); and 'e ink pearl memory', Arcadia_Missa, London, UK (2012).Selected group exhibitions include 'The Weight of Data', Tate Britain, London, UK (2015), 'The Future of Memory', Kunsthalle Wien, Austria (2015); 'Private Settings', Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, Poland (2014); 'Snow Crash', Banner Repeater, London, UK (2014); and 'Objectness', Outpost, Norwich, UK (2013). His work can be found via www.yuripattison.com

• published: 29 Apr 2015
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