Launch
07.05.19 – 08.05.19
Work
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Participants
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.
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