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 series of events at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts from September 21-October 27, 2012, and 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.
Bulletin board at Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Project Space, 2012
‘Sad, Depressed, People’ is a book by artist David Horvitz that explores a strange set of found images depicting despair within stock photography collections. The book was published in July by Jeff Khonsary’s new publishing project, New Documents. My contribution is a brief introduction that reflects on stock photography as an exceptionally post-Fordist mode of representation. I also collaborated with Sean Dockray, David Horvitz, Michael Mandiberg, Eric Nylund and Paul Pieroni on a collectively written glossary that defines everything from “Intellectual Property” to “Commodity Form” to “Suicide”.
‘Kami, Khokha, Bert and Ernie (World Heritage)’ is an exhibition at Tensta konsthall by artist Hinrich Sachs 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.
In Stockholm this spring I taught a course about the online image at the art school Konstfack. 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.
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 proud of 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 somehow not accountable to conditions of its production.
‘Publishing in Process: Ownership in Question’ is a series of public seminars at Tensta konsthall inviting artists and writers to present projects and perspectives around the intersection of art, intellectual property, political economy and the public realm.
At a moment when the distribution between what is privately owned and publicly shared in society is being fundamentally questioned and protested in many parts of the world, what do notions of production, property, ownership and exchange mean to us right now? Seminars by Florian Schneider, Antonia Hirsch, Marina Vishmidt, Matthew Stadler. Watch video documentation of all the events here.
Part of a larger collaborative project between artist Marysia Lewandowska and curator Laurel Ptak that will culminate with a book, published by Sternberg Press and Tensta konsthall, in 2013.
