The Dynamics of Currency Design in the Socio-Historical Context

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to show the dynamics of currency design in a socio-historical context, from antique coins to electronic payment transactions. Currency design visualizes the symbolic features of exchange depending on the types of money circulating in certain historical periods. Therefore, the visual aspect of money is important here, which at the level of the visible concerns the material features of money, and at the level of the visual characterizes the specifics of representations used in currency design. It is crucial to analyze the relationship between the visible and the visual in currency design from the point of its functionality, which makes it possible to conceptualize money not as an object, but as a process approached through the material and political systems that create and control money. Hence, currency design highlights the perspective of multidisciplinary potential of money as an object of research, which can be assessed without separating economics from cultural significance. Using the concept of evidence by M. Engelke, this article analyzes the symbolic complex of money functions in the context of the ideological implications shifting with the transformations of currency design. In addition, money is classified according to its visual typology, which demonstrates, in the process of dematerialization, the changes in the symbolic aspect of exchange, which stimulates restructuring of social relations. It may seem that in the conditions of digitalization, social relations are simplified, becoming more free and transparent as once the money becomes invisible, the possibility of ideological manipulation through currency design is vanishing. But, in reality, social relations acquire a more complex and asymmetric features, since the power that controls money not only becomes invisible and, as a result, elusive, but transfuses the very processes associated with the functioning of money.