Right now at work on ‘Wages For Facebook’ which draws upon ideas from a 1970s international feminist campaign as means to think through relationships of capitalism and class at stake with social media and digital labor today. In the 70s Wages For Housework demanded that the state pay women for their unwaged housework and caregiving, as the market economy was built upon massive amounts of this unacknowledged work——and its laborers could be seen to constitute a huge working class entirely overlooked by existing Marxist or socialist critiques. Wages for Housework built upon discourse from the anticolonial movement in order to extend the Marxian analysis of unwaged labor from the factory to the home. Along these lines ‘Wages For Facebook’ attempts to draw upon feminist discourse to extend the discussion of unwaged labor to new forms of value creation and exploitation online.
In 2012 Facebook reached more than 1 billion users and generated a revenue of 5.1 billion dollars. It is the first social-media website to be traded on the stock exchange wherein all content on its site is created by its users.
Wages For Facebook has been presented as a proposition for discussion inside the following contexts so far: The Photographic Universe, The New School, April 2013, New York; Core Studio, course taught by Huong Ngo & Audra Wolowiec at Parsons, April 2013, New York; Visions of The Now, Fylkingen, May 2013, Stockholm.
They say it’s friendship. We say it’s unwaged work. With every like, chat, tag or poke our subjectivity turns them a profit. They call it sharing. We call it stealing. We’ve been bound by their terms of service far too long——it’s time for our terms…
Image: reworking of Facebook’s like button made for Wages For Facebook by artist Anna Lundh
As part of a collective effort, I made a small contribution to a project currently on view at Interference Archive in Brooklyn. ‘Strike Then, Strike Now’ is an exhibition and event series that looks at forms of work stoppage and explores the protest and material culture that surrounds it. Interested in the ways that contemporary mass cultural depictions of labor, bosses, anti-work sentiments and strike are articulated, I helped put together a collection of memes collected via open call as a screen-based contribution to the exhibition.
I’m stickin to the Union! Shut It Down! “F*** Work! Si Se Puede! For as long as there has been work, workers have been withdrawing their labor in protest. Interference Archive is excited to present Strike Now, Strike Then, an exhibition and programing series exploring the use, power, and viability of this tactic, and how it has shifted over time. We will look at how work has been imagined and represented, how workers have both self-organized and been led, how economic conditions have shifted worker identities, and how “the boss” has been targeted, imagined, ridiculed, and transformed. For the exhibition we have assembled posters, pamphlets, books, images, jokes, memes, and other labor-related ephemera from Interference Archive and beyond. We will be activating these materials through a series of events including film screenings, reading and discussion groups, history sessions, a poster critique, storytelling nights with striking workers, and more.
Image: installation view of Elizabeth Warren minimum wage meme, Strike Then, Strike Now at Interference Archive, 2013
Currently researching cyberfeminist artistic practices that began in the early 1990s. I’m interested in cyberfeminism for its politicization of technology and online space and its experimentation with feminist forms of art in and beyond the browser. Often understood as a theoretical or academic discourse, in fact a major part of cyberfeminist production was/is artistic with numerous artists and curators internationally involved from its very beginnings. To my mind this work deserves greater attention and care inside an art historical framework——am thinking hard about how one might attend to that rigorously with cyberfeminism’s more radical demands in mind.
Image: from Digital Gender poster by Old Boy’s Network, 2002
‘To Have And To Owe’ is a research platform focused on debt and the social relations it engenders. This is a project in collaboration with Leigh Claire La Berge whose academic work examines cultural representations of finance. With our first exhibition and series of events at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts from September 21-October 27, 2012, with future activities being planned, the project seeks to widen discussion on topics like debt as discipline, equitable and inequitable redistributions of wealth, money as a social medium, banking crises, debt peonage, credit worthiness, collectivizing debt, philanthropy as debt in reverse, and debtor strikes among numerous other subjects related to credit card, healthcare, student and mortgage debt as well as the national debt and indebtedness of nations to one another.
Of particular interest is the way in which debt has been inscribed as a fundamental mechanism of power, force and subjugation in contemporary society. While debt is front and center as an issue in both politics and our personal lives, the basis of its control seems directly related to the fact that it is experienced opaquely. Debt exists simultaneously as an absence and a form of presence. And though debt is socially enforced it is almost always individually experienced with this fundamental tension rendering it difficult to represent collectively. So what happens if we work towards undoing debt’s unrepresentabilty? What if we experienced debt as a shared cultural form that is perceptible, communicable or materializable? How can debt be rendered as a nuanced historical, philosophical and even aesthetic problem in all of its social thickness inside American life?
Inside this framework, a range of artists, theorists, designers and others will offer lectures, performances, workshops, infographics, discussions, quilting sessions and visualizations, exploring the subject of debt and opening up a space in which its aesthetic and social dimensions may be considered as part of its economic register. All events free and open to the public.
Artist Cassie Thornton leads the audience to engage with debt’s physical representation, activating it as a malleable substance that might change through collective re-evaluation. OWS working group Arts & Labor hosts an open discussion and collaborative quilting session to address how debt functions in the art world. Theorist Richard Dienst considers the social worlds created by debt and looks at indebtedness as a social, economic and political bond as explored in his recent book The Bonds of Debt: Borrowing Against the Common Good (Verso, 2011). Media artist Fran Ilich hosts a meeting of the Diego de la Vega Experimental Economics and Finance Research Group, discussing debt as an instrument used historically to organize society, considering topics like money as abstraction, sovereign debt, ecological debt, and neocolonialism. Theorists Leigh Claire La Berge and Annie McClanahan share their respective work on cultural representations of debt, from the language and metaphors of finance to photographic depictions of foreclosure. In a workshop about the theory and practice of barter, artist Caroline Woolard will demonstrate the power of relationships based on mutual credit (not mutual debt) while performing a ritual of erasing money. NYU Professor of Art and Public Policy and Director of the Graduate Program in Arts Politics, Randy Martin will lecture on the cultural logics of financialization, unpacking what a derivative is and explaining why it matters to the production and circulation of art. Curator Laurel Ptak hosts a weekly reading group discussing David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Melville House, 2011) and Maurizio Lazzarato’s The Making of the Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition (Semiotext(e), 2012). An installation of infographics by designers Brendan Griffiths, Zak Klauck, and Mylinh Trieu Nguyen provide alternative models to mapping and realizing economic knowledge. And in collaboration with Occupy University’s fall exploration of debt, To Have And To Owe, will provide space for educational activities that the university will organize including teach-ins by George Caffentzis, Yakes McKee, Nicholas Mirzoeff, Andrew Ross and others.
Over the past thirty years, the United States’ economy has changed profoundly. Some political economists and historians date this to the early 1970s and the suspension of the convertibility of the United States Dollar for gold——a moment that marks what many social and cultural theorists have referred to as the “dematerialization of money.” Others date it a bit later, to Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker’s decision in 1979 to “break unions and empty factories” by unleashing rising interest rates and unleashing a tremendous recession in the U.S. that has come to be known as the “Volcker shock.” Nearly all observers agree, in the words of Giovanni Arrighi, that “something fundamental has changed about the way capitalism works,” many have argued that the increased presence, indeed, the leading presence, of the financial industry is the central cause.
As finance’s role has increased in the American economy, banks’ presence has increased in the lives of many Americans. With real wages stagnant since the late-1970s, daily social reproduction has become for many funded by private bank debt: student debt, consumer debt, mortgage debt, second-mortgage debt, and so on. While being in debt as old as human civilization itself, the structure of that indebtedness has changed. Today, credit card and student loan debt account for trillions of dollars of wealth——and although many people are in debt, it is much less clear that they have the ability to pay it off——ever. Rather, many of us live in a state of constant deferral, a relationship to an uncertain future when our debts will come due and the collection agencies will begin calling. To be in debt is to have one’s future tied in with another and in the contemporary American case that other is probably a bank. One used to be condemned for lending with excess interest; now it seems it is the debtor who must pay her or his “debt to society”.
More info here and here and here.
Image: opening performance by Cassie Thornton at Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Project Space, 2012
In Stockholm I taught a new course about the online image at the art school Konstfack in spring 2012. Some readings from our syllabus: Vilém Flusser ‘The Photograph as Post-Industrial Object’ (1986); Seth Price ‘Dispersion’ (2002); Hito Steyerl ‘In Defense of the Poor Image’ (2009); Peter Osborne ‘Infinite Exchange: Social Ontology of the Photographic Image’ (2010); Artie Vierkant ‘The Image-Object Post-Internet’ (2010); Florian Schneider ‘Theses on the Concept of Digitial Simulacrum’ (2011).
Engaging closely with these texts and numerous artworks and websites, with some great students, we worked towards articulating a yet-unwritten history, philosophy and politics of the online image. The course finished up with the students developing some compelling ideas for artistic projects inside this framework. The course was part of the larger, ongoing research project ‘Towards A History, A Politics, A Philosophy Of The Online Image’. Read more about that here.
‘Kami, Khokha, Bert and Ernie (World Heritage)’ is an exhibition at Tensta konsthall by artist Hinrich Sachs May–September 2012 which interestingly takes up the tv program Sesame Street as artistic subject matter. The project explores tensions between education and children’s play in relationship to media, ‘edutainment,’ cognitive capitalism and intellectual property——sparking an important discussion around our collective experiences as they are shaped by concepts like popular culture, heritage and value. You can read more about the exhibition, including ‘Objects As Contemporary Agents’, a conversation between Sachs & Ptak here.
Since fall 2011 I have been working as a curator at Tensta konsthall in Stockholm developing a number of projects——including the launch in January 2012 of a brand-new website made together with design studio Metahaven and programmer Henrik van Leeuwen. I’ve curated projects on the site by artists Priscila Fernandes, Haircut Before The Party, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Liz Magic Laser, and projects in 2013 will include works by Andrew Norman Wilson and Anna Lundh.
One aspect of the website I am especially excited about is that it puts forth a progressive paradigm for how online artistic labor might be regarded by institutions. I insisted that the fee structure for showing artworks on the website remained identical to how artists are renumerated for their participation in exhibitions that take place inside Tensta konsthall’s physical space. This gesture shakes up existing hierarchies between online and offline and challenges assumptions that web content should be free, disposable or less accountable to conditions of its production.
