I Am My Own Money is a conference on the relationship between money, time, and labor explored by artists Julieta Aranda and Anton Vidokle in their Time/Bank (2009–ongoing) installation for dOCUMENTA (13). It looks at barter economies throughout history and recent models of non-monetary systems of exchange, such as "Ithaca Hours," a local currency introduced in 1991 by Paul Glover in Ithaca, New York.
The ongoing project of Aranda and Vidokle establishes a time bank for the art community based on the exchange of labor between a network of participants. The currency is “hour-dollar” credits to the value of the time that each participant spends working for another. The artists present the project in a garden house in Karlsaue park, Kassel. One part of the display is an archive of past alternative currency systems; the other, a presentation on the current state of various Time/Bank offices that the artists have established in places like New York, Frankfurt am Main, Sydney, and The Hague. The second part of the installation includes Notes for a Film about Time Bank, a film that deals with historical attempts to implement alternative economies.
