DE(WORK) is an installation on the Degrowth of Work. Technological development and globalisation have created an apparent decoupling of economic growth from material resource extraction. This has only been made possible by the increased abstraction of labour, and the spatial distance between sites of production and consumption. The installation, (DE)WORK, exposes the interdependencies between processes of material extraction, productive labour, and growth within the globalised economy. It presents raw data on economic and financial, environmental, and political metrics driving complex processes of deforestation as an example of material extraction – in an abstract and continuous flow, manicured live by an ...

In the framework of Resonance, an exhibition of the Goethe-Institut New York curated by Rivet and work by Agency, Faivovich & Goldberg and weareQQ, Diedrich Diederichsen was invited to deliver a talk that would tackle some issues of object-oriented thinking within the arts, as well as considering the potential for resonance among entities relevant to contemporary practice (human, non-human, animate or inanimate). Because of Hurricane Sandy, Diederichsen’s talk had to be cancelled, but this change of plans led to a conversation between Diederichsen and the curators, Rivet (Sarah Demeuse and Manuela Moscoso), about the topics he had planned to bring forward. ...

a kind of forever present that takes the form of a theatrical script to perform a fictitious conversation among cultural theorists that considers what ever happened to postmodernism. The script culls parts of seminal texts by Fredric Jameson, Jean Baudrillard, Jürgen Habermas, Clement Greenberg and Jennifer Allen and combines them into a discussion about the transformation of postmodernism into a hybrid, constant stream of social media and digital technology that inherently changes our relationship with time.

The time clock is a device for the material worker. It ticks away, minute by minute, hour by hour over the course of each and every day. In the olden days the work completed was equal to the material proof at the end of eight hours. Today, the immaterial worker does not have the same symbiotic relationship with the time clock. The time clock for the immaterial worker is irrelevant because they work continually. And they work on what is most expected of them: the constant flow of ideas. Their time is not measured in concrete things. It is measured ...

In the last five years, the urban computing field has featured an impressive emphasis on the so-called “real-time, database-enabled city” with its synchronized Internet of Things. Julian Bleecker and Nicholas Nova argue to invert this common perspective and speculate on the existence of an “asynchronous city”. Through a discussion of objects that blog, they forecast situated technologies based on weak signals that show the importance of time on human practices. They imagine the emergence of truly social technologies that through thoughtful provocation can invert and disrupt common perspectives.

What is really the main shortcoming of art today? Where is the essence of its unfulfilled promise of a better world? According to Slovenian art theoretician Bojana Kunst1, a possible answer can be formulated with regard to the paradox that the artist personifies the ideal of the post-Fordist worker who produces using cognitive and affective powers in flexible working conditions without making a distinction between work and free time. Time is the neuralgic point of general precarisation symbolised by the image of the artist, which is the focus of the exhibition A Taste for Work by the Fokus Grupa art collective. ...

What do a feminist server, an art space located in a public park in North London, a ‘pirate’ library of high cultural value yet dubious legal status, and an art school that emphasizes collectivity have in common? They all demonstrate that art can play an important role in imagining and producing a real quite different from what is currently hegemonic; that art has the possibility to not only envision or proclaim ideas in theory, but also to realize them materially. Aesthetics of the Commons examines a series of artistic and cultural projects—drawn from what can loosely be called the (post)digital—that ...

These past few years, the fairly ancient concept we call “truth” has been bandied about the place quite a bit. Our social trust barometers, for a long time calibrated with “politician” on one side and “scientist” at the other, have been thrust into stormy weather. People like Donald Trump and Richard Dawkins have buried the needle into extremes of rhetorical squall, political uproar and techno-scientific demand, operationalising belief and fact in excessive ways — destructive of both self and others. The rest of us, muddling through this other ancient concept we call “modern life”, try and poise ourselves somewhere in ...

Robotics and soft AI are bringing everyday changes both to the work field and to our free time. How does this condition reflect itself on the artistic practice? Can we humans liberate ourselves from our anthropocentric viewpoint and accept the intellective superiority of machines? Will we be able to overcome our fear of automation? In the utopian view of a fully automated production, not only work ethics should be re-thought, but also our certainties about aesthetics.

We had the great pleasure of being joined by techno-animist and Turner Prize-winning artist Mark Leckey. We discuss UK Bikelife; commodity fetishism and how trainers and fashion are tokens of class with magic-like attributes; the repertory of spells the left still has against KeK’s Meme Magic; TechGnosis and conspiritualism in the age of Elon Musk. AND Lana Del Rey’s White Dress! You won’t want to miss this!

Today, many of us can remember the disappeared indigenous cosmologies as parts of ourselves, lost to colonialism, industrialization, communist revolutions, and capitalist wars. Many names have been given to ideological or historical grand narratives to soothe the pain of loss, to register those losses and render them searchable, but these memorializing mechanisms still fail to register the pain of losing something much larger that cannot be named—a deep relation to the world, to the cosmos, and to ourselves that gives us strength and sovereignty without need for any other earthly power of right or dominion. What if another kind of ...

The blockchain is Janus-faced. On one side its traits of transparency and decentralization promise much in terms of fairness and accountability, but on the other its monetary roots born as a financial payment system, albeit grounded in open-source software, mean its implementations are often stridently capitalistic. Furthermore, those involved in its development seem to oscillate between radical ethical standpoints and reductionist technological determinism. The blockchain engenders what has been called a “digital metalism” with the ability, like a modern philosopher’s stone, to transmutate life through a distributed ledger. That such a pecuniary minded technology is being touted as a new ...