eflux has recently launched an online platform encouraging an alternative economic model in the arts and culture: the time banking.

Imagine you are in Beijing or Helsinki and need someone to help you shop for materials or translate a press release. You would be able to draw on resources from Time/Bank without exchanging any money. Yet, it wouldn’t be for free neither simple bartering.

Time/Bank uses an immaterial currency and aims to build a parallel micro-economy for the international cultural community. With this online tool, groups and individuals can pool and trade time and skills, bypassing money as a measure of value. The idea is to connect existing needs with unacknowledged resources.

Every Time/Bank transaction will allow individuals to request, offer, and pay for services in "Hour Notes." When a task is performed, the credit hours earned may be saved and used at a later date, given to another person, or contributed towards developing larger communal projects.

Another good reason to use a time-based currency is to give a sense of worth for many exchanges commonly given in the cultural field. The initiative contemplates the lack of a countable measure to validate those exchanges which don’t fit the standards of validity in more conventional economic structures - in terms of significance or profitability.

But time banking is not a new idea. Its origins can be traced back to the Cincinnati Time Store 1827 - run by the American anarchist Josiah Warren – and continue in our present days. In 1991 Paul Glover started a successful time bank in Ithaca, New York, using a time-based currency based in the time exchange idea: the “Ithaca Hours”.

Another example of an alternative driven economy was around the "Notgeld", a form of unofficial "money" that appeared in Germany after the hyperinflation of 1923. It was issued by cities, boroughs, and private companies to compensate for a shortage of official coins and bills, and it was used just by the people who wanted –it was not a legal tender- for what it ended up having an stabilizing effect on the “real” money. As a valid certificate of debt, Notgeld was more stable than money itself, as it was pegged to material goods and often printed in goods and material—leather, fabric, porcelain, silk, or tin foil.

For more information about the Time/Bank and other existing time bank projects, you can visit eflux website:

Time/Bank