Launch
07.05.19 – 08.05.19

Work

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Participants

Andy AbbottPetra BauerNathan JonesShona MacnaughtonMartha RoslerSCOT-PEPFrances StaceysuperconductrMarika TroiliClara UrsittiMarina Vishmidt

Join us for a 2 day gathering to celebrate the end of the research arc Art & Work and the launch of the journal WORK. Bringing together international practitioners we will explore the intersection of art and work through a number of forms including performance, installation, workshops, screenings, papers and discussions. Subjects interrogated will include how workers organise and how art might help, how a post work future may look, how artificial intelligence is shaping our relationship to text and how to deal with exhaustion.

A special print edition of the journal will be available including articles from Dave Beech, Bruno Gulli, Corin Sworn and Josefine Wikström amongst many others.

Due to limited capacity at Skogen please reserve a space at the link below.

https://new.skogen.pm/event/TkMiGpfz9e7hnJCbj

Schedule

Day 1 - Tuesday7 May, 2019

Introduction

Workers!

Petra BauerFrances StaceySCOT-PEP

Workers! is a new film by artist and filmmaker Petra Bauer and a sex-worker led organisation SCOT-PEP.

It was filmed in the Scottish Trade Union Congress, a building rooted in workers’ struggles for rights and political representation. During their one day occupation of this institution, conversations unfold that centre the voices of sex workers demanding to be seen as experts on their own labour and lives.

Regular workshops help over three years supported the process of making the film and a new union banner made by artist Fiona Jardine. This collective approach is inspired by feminist film practitioners who emphasise the importance of making films with their subjects, not about them.

Workers! attends to contemporary conditions in Scotland and beyond, deploying film as a tool for exploring debates on women’s work.

Workers! is commissioned by Collective and produced by Collective and HER Film.

Is there a sweatshop in your pocket?

superconductr

superconductr carries out research at the intersection of art and digital platform labour. On-demand work distributed through digital platforms is a relatively recent phenomenon, which allows for labour-power to be bought and sold remotely with a few clicks, mostly through for-profit online platforms. The resulting work arrangements are characterised by precarity and contingency for workers, as capital aims to circumvent labour protections and offload the risks and costs of social reproduction onto labour. This lecture performance presents a number of superconductr’s artistic interventions that use digital labour platforms themselves as the medium with which to produce artworks that propose forms of critical engagement with the same platforms. The projects deal with issues such as the dispersal of work beyond the office/factory and throughout the social terrain, the construction of entrepreneurial and self-exploiting subjectivities, resulting anxieties and an ideology of self-care that aims to treat individual symptoms rather than social problems, the opacity of algorithmic control structures implemented by digital labour platforms, and the corporeality of the working body that tends to be obscured through the mediation of technology.

Break

Clara Ursitti

In his text The Exhausted (1992) on Samuel Beckett’s work, Deleuze characterises exhaustion as a whole lot more than being tired. He points to the characters in Beckett’s television piece Quad who can’t be affected by anything other than their position in space. The four performers neither arrive nor depart as they pace the footprint of the theatre stage with every possible combination of movement sequence, walking exhausts the potential of the space where they find themselves. Suppose this space isn’t the theatre but our workplace? Would standing still rather than endlessly moving multiply or deplete our exhaustion? Has exhaustion become a contagion? What does it smell and feel like? How can we break with the habit of never taking a break?

Mandatory Reconsideration

Shona Macnaughton

Mandatory Reconsideration is a new performance developed from the artist’s experience of participating in a Pecha Kucha.
Part artist talk, part pecha kucha, part Ted Talk X, part phone call to the HMRC to dispute a state benefit decision; Mandatory Reconsideration considers art’s relationship to different types of work, through re positioning the artist figure as over-identifying with their neoliberal nemesis The Creative Entrepreneur.

Redeployable Talent

Marika Troili

Redeployable Talent is a new iteration of the work I am, an installation of the material outcome of the artists attempt to transform herself into a more employable subject. The seemingly simple attempt to learn how to throw a plate on a potter’s wheel becomes a backdrop for a complex set of questions around emotional labor and the performance of a personality attractive to the labor market. For Redeployable Talent the unfired plates will be introduced to water over the course of the event rehydrating and reforming the outcome of the artists work.

Dinner

A vegan dinner will be provided by Skogen

Day 2 - Wednesday8 May, 2019

Critical Dysfunction in the Art of Machines that Read

Nathan Jones

Much intellectual labour is concerned with acts of reading, parsing and interpreting existing texts – from secondary source research papers, to primary ones, such as poems and data-sets – and synthesising them. The Re-reader [1] is a book scanner which transforms a physical book in to a series of algorithmic, semantic and aesthetic text performances. Every book scanned contributes to the training of a neural net, producing new texts. In effect, the computer learns to write a synthesis of everything it has ‘read’, while the human is bathed in pure semantic encounter with the raw material. This presentation for PARSE uses a close reading of The Re-reader’s outputs to critique the efficiency-narrative of AI and labour today. Critical artworks intervene in emerging technologies at vital moments, shifting them away from the neoliberal and fintech utilities they’re associated with. Accordingly, although it fails to offer a functional example of either machine learning or human reading, I suggest that The Re-Reader’s dysfunctionality is itself evocative of the current conditions for entanglements of human and machine intelligence. The presentation also includes a discussion of some other current and recent AI artworks that suggest new kinds of reading for the workplace of the future.

To Art in Work, and Conversely: Reconsidering a Fast-Moving Situation

Marina Vishmidt

The talk will hinge on how it comes to matter how the terms in the art and work conversation are defined, and what relationships are mapped between them. If nothing is self-evident about art, including its ‘right to exist’ (Adorno), the same goes for work, including artistic labour. This talk will thus try to set forward some possibilities of definition, for the political strategies and ontological worlds they can enable. In counter to a positivist politics of work, the speculative force of the transversality of work in art and the possibilities of ‘unworking’ art itself are at issue.

Lunch

A vegan lunch will be provided by Skogen

Lutopia

Andy Abbott

Andy Abbott will offer a workshop on his ongoing project Lutopia, developed as part of the Testbeds programme at University of Bedfordshire in 2018 and commissioned as a lead project for Luton’s pilot city of culture programme in 2019. Lutopia is a Virtual Reality video game in which the player explores and creates an alternate reality ‘postwork’ version of Luton, a postindustrial town in the South of England. All the content for the game has been drawn from real life, open calls and workshops with Lutonians including vulnerable and marginalised groups. The workshop that will form the basis of this session involves designing characters, places and situations that will eventually become part of the game – inviting participants to imagine and think through everyday life in a town where no-one is required to work for a living.

Workers Inquiry

Day 3 - Wednesday8 May, 2019

Keynote

Martha Rosler

Contributors

A

Andy Abbott

Andy is an artist, musician, writer and arts organiser who lives in Bradford, UK. He has exhibited and performed internationally as an individual artist and in various collaborations including the art collective Black Dogs. He plays internationally solo and in various groups, and composes music for film, performance and installations. In 2012 he was awarded his practice-led PhD from the University of Leeds with a thesis on ‘art, self-organised cultural activity and the production of postcapitalist subjectivity’. Andy is also an arts organiser and has worked as Environment Programme Co-ordinator for In-Situ, director of the Community Interest Company Art in Unusual Spaces, and piloted a Centre for Socially Applied Arts as Producer Music and Visual Arts for University of Bradford.

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B

Petra Bauer

Petra Bauer works as an artist and filmmaker. She is concerned with the question of film as a political practice, and sees it as a space where social and political negotiations can take place. Recent exhibitions include: Soon Enough: art in action, Tensta Konsthall (2018); Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More, Riga Biennial (2018): Show Me Your Archive and I Will Tell You Who is in Power, KIOSK, Ghent (2017); Women in Struggles, on tour to different Folkets Hus (People’s Houses) in Sweden (2016–17); and All the World’s Futures, 56th Venice Biennale (2015). Petra is an initiator of the feminist platform k.ö.k (Kvinnor könskar kollektivitet – Women Desire Collectivity).

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J

Nathan Jones

Nathan Jones is a lecturer in Fine Art (Digital Media) and Fellow of the Institute for Social Futures at Lancaster University, UK. His art and critical works look at the contemporary conditions for writing in the context of new technologies. This work has featured at Transmediale (2018, 2019), Liverpool Biennial (2018) and Abandon Normal Devices (2019). He is co-editor of several books on language, technology and publishing, with Torque Editions, including Artists Re:Thinking the Blockchain (2017) and The Act of Reading (2015). His most recent work is a small-data AI that produces possible future headlines produced as part of The British Library’s public programme: Crash Blossoms/If and Only If (with Sam Skinner and Tom Schofield).

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Shona Macnaughton

Shona Macnaughton (UK) is an artist whose practice is rooted in performance, writing and film, and questions of technology, subjectivity and labour, staging reenactments of the relationships between characters, making scripts and actions which are set up to confront an audience.

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R

Martha Rosler

Martha Rosler (US) works in video, photography, text, installation, and performance. Her work focuses on the public sphere, exploring issues from everyday life and the media to architecture and the built environment, especially as they affect women.

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S

SCOT-PEP

Scot-Pep is a sex worker-led charity that advocates for the safety, rights and health of everyone who sells sex in Scotland.

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Frances Stacey

Frances Stacey is a curator and producer based in Edinburgh. Her work draws on expanded approaches to curatorial practice, often involving open-ended research and collaboration with others. Since 2013 she has been Producer at Collective, Edinburgh, where she closely supports artists and groups to make new work, film, exhibitions, events, summer schools and off-site programmes. She is a coordinator of the reading group on Social Reproduction: in art, life and struggle, co-founder of artist-run organisation Rhubaba and is a board member of SCOT-PEP.

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superconductr

superconductr is an artistic research project into structural conditions and contradictions of on-demand labour distributed through digital platforms. superconductr’s work aims to make these visible through artistic methods including delegated performance and interventions that utilise the functionalities of existing digital labour platforms, through participation in activism for precarious workers’ rights, and through theoretical investigations. The name superconductr refers to Michel Foucault’s description of power as the conduct of conduct, which here takes into account conduction as the transmission, control and mining of data streams in networks that facilitate the mobilisation, capture and extraction of human labour power. superconductr is a project by artist Matthias Kispert, a practice-based PhD candidate at the Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media (CREAM), University of Westminster that is tuned into collective flows, connected to and involved in building cooperative assemblages.

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Marika Troili

Marika Troili (SE) is an artist based in Stockholm. Her practice often includes immersive research processes which manifests as text, performative readings, installations and video.

She has participated in exhibitions at Marabouparken, Sundbyberg; Skåne Art Association, Malmö; Nida Art Colony, Lihuania; BAK, the Netherlands; Bâtiment d’art contemporain, Switzerland; Maskinhuset in Grängesberg, and at the Museum of Work in Norrköping, Sweden, among others. Her artist’s book Inga kärleksbrev idag heller – Fortsatt framgångsrik konstnadsanpassning och löpande effektivisering [No love letters today, either – continued successful cost adjustment and continuous efficiency improvement] was published by Konstfrämjandet, [People’s Movements
for Art Promotion], in 2015. Troili holds a MFA from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm.

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Clara Ursitti

Clara Ursitti (UK) is an artist working with the non-visual through situations, scent and interventions that occupy the space between sculpture and performance.

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Marina Vishmidt

Marina Vishmidt is a London-based writer, editor and critic occupied mainly with questions around art, labour and value. She is the author of Speculation as a Mode of Production (Brill, early 2016) and A for Autonomy (with Kerstin Stakemeier) (Textem, late 2014). She often works with artists and contributes to journals such as Mute, Afterall, Texte zur Kunst, Ephemera, Kaleidoscope, Parkett, and OPEN! as well as co-/edited collections and catalogues, most recentlyAnguish Language (anguishlanguage.tumbr.com). She has authored chapters in The Routledge Companion to Art and Politics (Routledge, forthcoming) and The ECONOMY Reader (University of Liverpool Press, forthcoming).
She has taught individually or as part of a collective at University of the Arts, Berlin, Central Saint Martins, Goldsmiths, the Royal Academy, Copenhagen and the Dutch Art Institute in Arnhem. Her work on debt, social reproduction and artistic enterpreneurialism can be found on libcom.org and in the e-flux journal, and she has also lectured and given workshops on these topics in universities, art institutions and activist spaces.
Vishmidt also has a long-term involvement with artists’ moving image in critical and exhibition contexts such as feminist film distributor Cinenova and the free cinema Full Unemployment Cinema.

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