The Interledger Community 🌱: Hollis Wong-Wear

Future|Money Artist Liaison — ILF Grant Final Report

Hollis Wong-Wear — Fri, 26 Jan 2024 03:51:42 +0000

filming the Future|Money short film at the 2023 Interledger Summit [Image Description: A man uses a camera to film two individuals speaking at a table about art and culture in the lobby of a hotel. They sit next to a window with lush green trees.]

Brief Project Description

Working with the Programs team, I provided support for the Future|Money Artist Cohort, from participating in the selection of artists to facilitating the monthly convenings to supporting on the ground for the 2023 Summit Open Studio exhibition. I also co-hosted the Future|Money Podcast, participated in many rounds of grantee applications, broadcast my participation to my intersecting community of artists and community organizers, and created a short film to document the work and perspectives of the Future|Money cohort.

Project Update

I'm very proud and grateful to have worked so closely with Interledger's Programs Team to bring together the Future|Money Artist Cohort and support the exhibition of their work. As someone from a non-technical background who was admittedly a bit intimidated by the technology of open payment protocols and nodes, working alongside Lawil, Ayesha and Kokayi provided an inspired philosophical entry into the importance of and possibilities within financial inclusion and how it can be communicated to and built upon by those who are not technologists. Creative visioning beyond incrementalism and iteration is essential in these times of urgent social inequality and pulsing need. Being in dialogue with the artists as they developed both their work and their relationships and rapport with each other was powerful - the cohort was truly international and multi-disciplinary, and so many already had experience advocating for open internet and equitable tech policies within their home countries, with bold critical analysis on where the promise of democracy and equality fall short within our contemporary economic and political landscape. I saw my role as both fostering relationship building and discourse as well as facilitating the collective narrative of the cohort, which included deep learning and inquiry about the artists' backgrounds, artistic practice, and philosophies. I am very proud of the short film that I created with my colleague Spencer Byam-Taylor that weaves the work and stories of each artist together into a greater whole, and demonstrates how powerful it is to have creative minds and artists at the heart of technological development towards financial inclusion.

Project Impact & Target Audience(s)

The outputs of my Ambassadorship certainly evolved based on emergent needs of the Programs Team and the Future|Money program. When I first applied to the Ambassadorship, the Future|Money program had not been fully developed, and since there was a delay in my onboarding, by the time I began my Ambassadorship the grant program was in full swing. While I didn't anticipate utilizing my background in grant making in this Ambassadorship, I was grateful to have the opportunity to participate in grantee application review and therefore learn so much more about the broader Interledger community and practitioners in the intersecting worlds of open internet advocacy, equitable finance and tech development. Co-hosting the Future|Money podcast with Lawil was another opportunity that emerged that I was happy to leverage my experience in hosting towards. I'm excited to share the full suite of episodes as well as the short film soon.

Communications and Marketing

I was grateful to be invited to be a panelist on the ILP Summit Recap in December 2023, and am looking forward to sharing out the episodes of Future|Money Podcasts and the short film upon completion.

What’s Next?

My next steps are rounding out the interviews with the Future|Money artist cohort as well as finalizing the short film to be presented on the Interledger website!

Community Support

I'm so appreciative to be within the larger Interledger Foundation community and will reach out when I have calls to action to support my work as an artist, organizer and writer.

Additional Comments

Just want to give a big shout out of gratitude to Chris and Kokayi for believing in me and providing the opportunity to serve as a Community Ambassador, and to Lawil and Ayesha for being fantastic collaborators throughout my tenure as an Ambassador. Finally, much love to all of the Future|Money artists; my mind was truly blown and my creative cup of inspiration runneth over after having the opportunity to be in community and conversation with you all. I leave this Ambassadorship further certain of the central place that artists and cultural workers must have within emerging economies and technology for true equity and change making.

Reimagining Everything: My Aims as an Interledger Community Ambassador

Hollis Wong-Wear — Thu, 11 May 2023 15:41:31 +0000

Hello! My name is Hollis Wong-Wear and I am excited to be a new Interledger Community Ambassador. I come to this work as an artist, a community organizer, a filmmaker, and a dot connecting enthusiast who is passionate about the intersection of creativity and social change. I am fascinated by new and daring models to challenge the status quo, and thus I am thrilled to dig into the technology and opportunity of the Interledger Protocol and catalyze discourse about creating more equitable financial ecosystems. More specifically, I have been honored to participate in the Future|Money Grant Program to bring in artists and creatives to generate new work that imagines financial futures - big shout out to Kokayi Issa for his vision with the program, and for bringing me into this fold.

Here in the United States, we celebrate May as Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month, so I want to share a bit about an Asian American hero of mine who inspires my work largely and whose philosophy I feel speaks directly to the potential of the Interledger Protocol.

Grace Lee Boggs was born in 1915 to Chinese immigrant parents in Providence, RI, and was a woman who forged her own path as an intellectual, an author, and an activist. She was the first Chinese American woman to receive a doctorate in Philosophy, and after establishing herself as a notable intellectual and author within the socialist literary community, she departed academia to devote herself to on-the-ground service in alignment with Black-led labor and community organizing in Detroit. She intrinsically understood the importance not only of cross-racial solidarity, but of the power of self-reflection and self-evolution to be an agent of change and justice in the world. She believed not in incrementalism but in how creativity and imagination could spark dynamic shifts for the poor and the marginalized. As she wrote in a quote I revisit often:

"The time has come for us to reimagine everything. We have to reimagine work and go away from labor. We have to reimagine revolution and get beyond protest. We have to think not only about change in our institutions, but changes in ourselves." - Grace Lee Boggs

Reading Boggs' work in the pandemic gave me a great amount of hope as we saw system after system fail the most vulnerable in our communities. It inspired me so much that I wrote a song, "Grace Lee," with the refrain reimagine everything so that every time I perform I can share her life and her call for us to be more daring in how we change ourselves to change the world. The art I've included here is an illustration of a young Grace Lee Boggs by Janelle Quibuyen.

I think her call to "reimagine everything" is precisely what the Interlegder Protocol endeavors: to imagine universal connectivity and empowerment for those who have been traditionally excluded from financial systems, and an ecosystem that encourages and resources instead of punishes the marginalized. The current financial system hums on inequity and disparity of wealth; as impossible as it may feel to go beyond what we've always known, how can we use our imagination to fuel new possibilities in this space towards radical financial inclusion?

Another element of her work I feel speaks to my personal aims with the Interleger Community Ambassadorship is honoring critical connections over critical mass. I revisited this passage in Grace Lee Boggs’ The Next American Revolution in which she quotes Margaret Whetley, who in her work tackles how helpless it feels to act on a small scale level when problems are so massive and abstracted. She employs the concept of quantum physics to beat back against the idea that “scaling” is the most worthy trait of worthwhile action.

“A quantum view explains the success of small efforts quite differently. Acting locally allows us to be inside the movement and flow of the system, participating in all those complex events occurring simultaneously. We are more likely to be sensitive to the dynamics of this system, and thus more effective.

However, changes in small places also affect the global system, not through incrementalism, but because every small system participates in an unbroken wholeness. Activities in one part of the whole create effects that appear in distant places. Because of these unseen connections, there is potential value in working anywhere in the system. We never know how our small activists will affect others through the invisible fabric of our connectedness. […]

The real engine of change is never critical mass. Dramatic and systemic change always starts with critical connections.”

I love this passage and I feel it directly aligns with the potential of the Interledger Protocol to transform people's lives. Interconnectedness can start small: one transaction, one conversation. Scaling for scaling's sake is how we've gotten to the deeply inequitable systems we now operate within. How can we imagine new ways of connecting?

I think this is the heart of why the Future|Money Grant Program, and the artists who will be creating with this cohort, is so exciting. As an Ambassador, I look forward to developing these critical connections within the cohort itself as well as within each artist's community, understanding that local depth does indeed have global reverberations and impact. I look forward to seeing how I can support and facilitate the artists as they explore, consider, and create new possibilities through their generative artistic practice. I wish for my work to be organic, responsive, and added fuel to the momentum of these artists' visions, individually and collectively.

Feel free to reach out, and I look forward to sharing more as the Future|Money Grant Program proceeds!

Hollis