It's been many years since I swapped my fine art studies for anthropology and economics, but my interests are now converging. I've just published a paper about the trade of paintings in Haiti and the Dominican Republic in the journal Visual Studies.

My paper, called "Why the cocks trade: what a transnational art market can reveal about cross-border relations," is part of a special issue addressing the relationship between ethnography and art.

Heather Horst and I are happy to announce that our foray into exploring the aesthetics of mobile money is now in print. Published in The Routledge Companion to Mobile Media (edited by Gerard Goggin and Larissa Hjorth), our chapter is called "The Aesthetics of Mobile Money Platforms in Haiti."

We examine the design, aesthetics and use of Digicel's TchoTcho Mobile and Voila's T-Cash in Haiti. While mobile money is largely understood through a lens of poverty and economic transactions, in this chapter we suggest that people’s relationship to mobile money has as much to do with the aesthetics of mobile money as a designed environment and platform that goes far beyond the user interface.

Take a walk around Amsterdam's historic centre. What do you see? Canals, coffee shops, and stalls selling tulip bulbs are some of the typical features promoted to visitors. Beneath this veneer, however, is a rather startling history of financial innovation whose consequences are felt globally.

To get closer to this legacy, I took a walking tour of Amsterdam's financial history, along with other people who had attended the MoneyLab conference. Run by payments expert Simon Lelieveldt, this two-hour tour takes in the Goliaths and oddities of the city's past and present.

The meeting of minds in viva is over. Posters removed, photos posted on Flickr, speakers returned home on multimodal transport. But MoneyLab the project has just begun.

The two-day conference was not the cumulation of years of research, but the launch of a new endeavour to network diverse minds to consider "digital experiments with revenue models, payment systems and currencies against the backdrop of ongoing global economic decline."

Where will it go to from here? What did we achieve that we can build upon, and what needs to be brought into the fold that was forgotten?