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 ...

A conversation with Diedrich Diederichsen about non-human labor, time and value. Made in the context of Resonance at Goethe-Institut in New York. (fall 2013)

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 ...

City Rising from metahaven on Vimeo. This short video is about “the internet” and the global spread of affective, precarious labor, captured in the notion of love. It is also an homage to Constant Nieuwenhuys, architect of New Babylon. New Babylon was a utopian city for which Constant developed models, plans, and writings throughout the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s. New Babylon would give free reign to a life of play, as people would be liberated from the obligation to perform productive and manual labor. Models of New Babylon were filmed as bizarre, beautiful shapes in the foreground of the image. Now ...

Like all collaborative endeavors, bringing together an edited collection is about fixing as much as gathering the insights and details (and yes, flaws and limits) of individually or jointly conceived pieces to bring about a larger conversational whole – a drawing forth, or drawing together, of scattered threads and pieces into something considerably messier than a quilt. All the more so when the collection is the result of a generative collaboration, bringing guest editors Lara Houston, Daniela K. Rosner, Steven J. Jackson in conversation with the continent. collective to present this special issue “R3pair Volume”. The conversation of course runs ...

Désoeuvrement! Variously translated as unworking or inoperativity is a notion that haunts contemporary political theory and practice. Unworking overturns the typical valuation of work and action as positive and constructive and opens an avenue to think radical passivity and inactivity as aesthetic and political practices that question the modernist mantra of purposeful production and ceaseless activity. At its most basic, unworking is the critique of work and of everything that we imagine as such. The work of community-building for instance, the work of art, work as wage labour, even psychoanalysis, imagined as ‘working through’. This issue of continent is dedicated to unworking in its various guises. ...

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.

Koichiro Osaka’s text for this issue begins at the Sunshine 60 skyscraper in Tokyo. According to myth and a historical reading, the skyscraper is named for the sixty Japanese war criminals executed in 1948 in what was then Sugamo Prison. In 1978, the former prison became the tallest skyscraper in Asia. As Osaka explains, Sunshine 60 may be the largest war monument ever built. The building serves at once as a haunted gravesite and reassurance of the ongoing sunshine of fascism and capitalism. Also in this issue, Françoise Vergès describes a daily ritual in multiple urban centers where thousands of black ...

On November 7, 1929, the Museum of Modern Art “opened in a five-room rented space with an ‘historical’ exhibition of (European) Post-Impressionist art, titled ‘The First Loan Exhibition: Cezanne, Gauguin, Seurat, Van Gogh.’” MoMA’s founding director, Alfred Barr, had the idea that modern works that passed a test called “Torpedo in Time” would, after some fifty years, be considered historical and transfer to the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At the time, Gertrude Stein also famously quipped that the very idea of a museum of the modern was an oxymoron. In short, MoMA was more of a kunsthalle ...

The critique of bureaucracy slithers like a sewer—hidden, warm, and necessary—beneath the aging towers of the twentieth-century intellectual metropolis. Arising first as one answer to The Question—namely, what happened in the USSR?—bureaucracy eventually came to replace the bourgeoisie as the preferred explanation for why everything was the way it was. To this day, pseudonyms for bureaucracy remain highly fashionable pieces of conceptual hyperbole. Any characterization of instituted sociality as uniform unfreedom—the spectacle, the body without organs, libidinal economics, Empire, Bloom—has its origins in the bureaucratic obsession with control, as distinct from the bourgeois obsession with ownership. In “The Great Accelerator,” Oleksiy ...

Indentured to the past, we drag our inherited identities through a forest of networks bursting with mysterious intellectual fruit. We’re not sure which concepts are poisonous and which are safe. History is like a mistranslated phrasebook full of old-fashioned illustrations which everyone makes fun of on the internet. Attempts at organization feel fanciful and absurd: eclectic inventories of apocalypse-kitsch. In “A Palace of Unsaids,” Rob Goyanes considers the work of mourning under twenty-first century conditions. Does it matter if we show up to the wrong shift at the memorial-factory as long as we do our time? Those that insist on mourning ...

The seventy-two dimensions of the universe are represented in a single vertebrate body: a snake coiled in a continuous circle, biting its own tail. This symbol was etched within The Enigmatic Book of the Netherworld, on the second shrine of a young king, Amen-tut-ankh, who, before he ascended, was once called Tutankhaten—the living image of Aten, the sun. The circled snakes (one rings around an etching of the mummified pharaoh’s head, the other around the feet) depict a confluence of the gods Ra and Osiris, light and death eternally returning, swallowed and reborn and always encircling night into day. Some historians ...

The authors reflect on the relationship between labor and technology in urban space where communication, attention, and physical movement generate financial value for a small number of private stakeholders. Online and off, Internet users are increasingly wielded as a resource for economic amelioration, for private capture, and the channels of communication are becoming increasingly inscrutable. Liu and Scholz ask: How does the intertwining of labor and play complicate our understanding of exploitation?

From the fast-food industry to the sharing economy, precarious work has become the norm in contemporary capitalism, like the anti-globalization movement predicted it would. This book describes how the precariat came into being under neoliberalism and how it has radicalized in response to crisis and austerity. It investigates the political economy of precarity and the historical sociology of the precariat, and discusses movements of precarious youth against oligopoly and oligarchy in Europe, America, and East Asia. Foti covers the three fundamental dates of recent history: the financial crisis of 2008, the political revolutions of 2011, and the national-populist backlash of ...

Good-bye, rational culture! Let Guatemalan writer Alan Mills welcome you to the philosophy of tricksters. Follow him on a tour through indigenous mythology, classical education, and the literary canon, thoroughly mixed with hacking theory and with popular culture—from Star Wars and Breaking Bad to familiar figures like Bugs Bunny and El Zorro. Get to know Michael Jackson and David Bowie, Guy Fawkes and the Popol Vuh, the sacred book of the Maya-K’iche’, through this fulminant essay on old and new strategies for resisting superpowers. Mills currently lives in Berlin and Vienna, and Hacking Coyote is an expanded and elaborated version of ...

For more than thirty years Farocki has been a filmmaker, documentarist, film-essayist and installation artist. What preoccupies him above all is not so much an image of life, but the life of images, as they surround us in the newspapers, the cinema, history books, user manuals, posters, CCTV footage and advertising. His vast oeuvre of some sixty films includes three feature films (Zwischen den Kriegen/Between the Wars, Etwas wird sichtbar: Vietnam/In Your Eyes: Vietnam, Wie Man sieht/As You See), essay films (e.g. Images of the World-Inscription of War), critical media-pieces, experimental work, children’s features for television, historical film essays (e.g. ...

Author and activist Andrew Ross surveys the contributions of Palestinian labor to the building of Israel.

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF SOCIAL CREATIVITY The book published by F/SUW in cooperation with MayFly Books gathers papers based on presentations at the conference Labour of the Multitudes? Political Economy of Social Creativity, organized in Warsaw in October 2011. It includes contributions by renowned thinkers and artists, including Luc Boltanski, Neil Cummings, Diedrich Diederichsen, Isabelle Graw, Massimiliano Tomba, Stevphen Shukaitis, and Martha Rosler, among many others. The title Joy Forever refers to the false promise of a common happiness, constantly played out by the proponents of the creative class and creative economy – the very promise that since Romanticism has been ascribed ...

A screening and discussion of films on recent struggles in the logistics sector. BBC, Panaroma: Amazon’s Truth Behind the Click, 2013 Maria Elena Scandaliato, Sciopero Generale Logistica, 2013 Cinema Action, Dock Strike 1972 Films and clips from Oakland, Bologna, Ellwood and more… Guest speakers from Angry Workers of the World [http://angryworkersworld.wordpress.com/] Pamphlet Contents: Brian Ashton The Factory Without Walls (short version) Wildcat Umschlagspunkt Angry Workers of the World (Wealmoor Leaflet) Angry Workers of the World (Jack Wills Leaflet) UniNomade Circuits of Recomposition: Towards and Beyond the #22M Logistics Workers’ Strike Society of Enemies Blockading the Port Is Only The First of Many Last Resorts Further Resources: Brian Ashton, ‘Logistics and The Factory Without Walls’ (long version) http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/logistics-and-factory-without-walls Jasper Bernes, ‘Logistics, Counterlogistics ...

Losers and Winners A documentary by Ulrike Franke and Michael Loeken Germany 2006, 96 mins For one and a half years, filmmakers Ulrike Franke and Michael Loeken watch as a gigantic industrial site is dismantled, documenting the stories accompanying its disappearance: how the coke workers in the industrial Ruhr Region experience the arrival and working methods of the Chinese, their feelings upon seeing their pride in their work vanish along with what was the most modern coke factory in the world, but also the strain and conflicts the Chinese workers face during their 60-hour work week far away from home and family, ...

The MyCreativity Reader is a collection of critical research into the creative industries. The material develops out of the MyCreativity Convention on International Creative Industries Research held in Amsterdam, November 2006. This two-day conference sought to bring the trends and tendencies around the creative industries into critical question. The ‘creative industries’ concept was initiated by the UK Blair government in 1997 to revitalise de-industrialised urban zones. Gathering momentum after being celebrated in Richard Florida’s best-seller The Creative Class (2002), the concept mobilised around the world as the zeitgeist of creative entrepreneurs and policy-makers. Despite the euphoria surrounding the creative industries, there ...

Featuring artist and lecturer of Internet Art at Stanford University, JENNY ODELL who is the author of a new field book for the attention economy “How to Do Nothing” (Melville House, 2019). Odell speaks to NM about disorientation in the current online space, the value of physical context and community, and the practical tactics of refusal. Plus: bioregionalism, Silicon Valley Ayahuasca, the origins of the commodification of time, lucid dreaming — and bird watching.

A zine published by The Creative Independent, compiling quotes, excerpts, and recommendations from working artists, all gathered from our archive. Topics covered include making money through your art, financial planning, day jobs, and starting a creative business. Yumna Al-Arashi’s real talk on earning money through your art, Philip Glass on getting paid for what you make, and Ally-Jane Grossan on how to approach financial planning.

Alysabeth Alexander and I recorded this conversation a few hours before the Service Employees International Union (in which she has important responsibilities) filed a lawsuit against the city of San Francisco, Google and Apple for deliberately ignoring the environmental impact that the tech industry buses (aka google buses) have on the Californian city in their daily use. The environmental aspect of the buses is the one that has been chosen for the lawsuit, yet the main political consequence of their very function is the rampant gentrification that accompany their routes. In this conversation, Alysabeth describes the various actions that the ...

The iPhone 3G, this innocuous and already slightly outmoded little cluster of minerals and marketing, is an emblematic meeting point for the material and symbolic processes shaping the contemporary entanglement of social and geologic stratifications: both product and engine of the great cleavages of the global economy, those geopolitical fractures that Marxist critics refer to with euphemistic kid gloves as “uneven development;” a treasured possession bound up with resource wars and environmentally destructive extraction practices driven by a rapacious global system of neo-colonial corporate-feudalism; the consumer excretion of a world where exhausted Chinese factory workers are driven to suicide satisfying ...