PROJECTS making a
living as a creative worker
Surviving as a cultural or artistic worker in the city has never been
easy. Creative workers find themselves celebrated as engines of
economic growth, economic recovery and urban revitalization even as the
conditions for our continued survival becomes more precarious. How can
you make a living today in such a situation? That is, how to hold
together the demands of paying the rent and bills while managing all
the tasks necessary to support one’s practice? How to manage the
tensions between creating spaces for creativity and imagination while
working through the constraints posed by economic conditions?
June 11th, 2010 @ 6:30 PM Birkbeck Cinema 43 Gordon Square
London WC1H 0PD
Obedience, Stanley Milgram, 16mm, 1962, 45 mins
Folie à Deux, National Film Board of Canada, 16mm, 1952, 15 mins
Motion Studies Application, 16mm, ca. 1950, 15 mins
Obedience documents the infamous “Milgram experiment”
conducted at Yale
University in 1962, created to evaluate an everyday person’s
deference
to authority within institutional structures. Psychologist Stanley
Milgram designed a scenario in which individuals were made to think
they were administering electric shocks to an unseen subject, with a
researcher asking them to increase the voltage levels despite the loud
cries of pain that seemed to come from the other room. Milgram saw his
test, conducted mere months after Adolf Eichmann’s trial in
Jerusalem,
as a way to understand the environments that made genocide possible.
INTERVENTIONS Franco 'Bifo' Berardi - April 12, 2010
European Union is on the verge of collapse. This is what many
economists think and some journalists say, while
political and intellectual life is agonizing on the continent, heading
towards the darkness of cynicism and racism.
Art & Labor Summit
April 22nd, 6pm-9pm Cell
Projects Space 258 Cambridge Heath Road, London
We'd like you to join us for a special event and organizational party
open to all who are interested in the better understanding and active
transformation of the way art, free labour, and education work. Crises
are moments of great opportunity, as we all know, and those defunding
and devaluing our labour have been busy applying this knowledge.
INTERVENTIONS: Gigi Roggero
“Look, you went to the wrong floor” Romano Alquati would
answer at the beginning of the 1990s to a leftist student who wanted to
write a dissertation on (factory) workers. If you want to write a
dissertation on (factory) workers you should go to the second floor, to
“Archeology.” Like the “rude pagan race”
[Tronti’s description of the mass worker], Alquati had no gods
and refused myths. The cult of the past is a wretched thing. When he
arrived in Torino in 1960, after growing up in Cremona and having lived
in Milano in the commune of via Sirtori 2 (a true cultural and
intellectual crucible of the 1950s and ‘60s, meeting point of
Phenomenology and Marxism, international crossroad of philosophers and
revolutionaries), Romano, like the politically and humanly exceptional
generation that would give life to operaism, was not in search of a
metaphysical, disembodied subject, heroic custodian of the general
interest. “There have been and there are still a populist and
welfarist operaism (of Christian origin), a trade-unionist operaism, a
combination of both, whose characteristic was considering (factory)
workers “the weak section” of the population, thus in need
of help. These operaists love (factory) workers, the very condition of
being a factory worker. The ‘political’ operaists, instead,
were interested in proletarian workers because, against all
universalisms, they saw them as strong, a power.”
Thursday March
25th, 7pm @ Red & Black
Cafe - 400 SE 12th avenue (at Oak) Portland,
OR
Join us for an evening with two autonomist authors and organizers from
Portland and London in exploring contemporary politics, the continued
imposition of work, current struggles in the University and elsewhere,
militant and co-research, and in celebrating the release of their
recent books. In the U.S. and across the planet struggles
against enclosures, the dismantling of the University, for public and
community space, against "the endless imposition of work," and against
a form of life that is increasingly precarious - are currently taking
place. By "reading" these and neighboring struggles we seek
to create a world in which many worlds fit. A discussion on these
issues and other topics will follow short talks.
INTERVENTIONS:
Stefano Harney & Fred Moten
New intervention from Stefano Harney and Fred Moten about policy,
planning, opportunism, and governance. This follows up and extends
their analysis of the politics of the undercommons: "Exuberantly
metacritical hope has always exceeded every immediate circumstance in
its incalculably varied everyday enactments of the fugitive art of the
impossible. This art is practiced on and over the edge of politics,
beneath its ground, in animative and improvisatory decomposition of its
inert body. It emerges as an ensemblic stand, a kinetic set of
positions, but also takes the form of embodied notation, study, score.
Its encoded noise is hidden in plain sight from the ones who refuse to
see and hear—even while placing under constant
surveillance—the thing whose repressive imitation they call
for
and are."
Berkeley,
CA - March 18th (as part of the Cultural Studies Association
conference)
How do cultural studies and autonomism converge and diverge over
matters of power, the state, and subjectivity? Come join us for a
series of panels (organized by Stevphen Shukaitis and Jack
Bratich) planned as part of the annual Cultural Studies
Association conference. They will explore the future behind our backs,
focusing on how autonomist politics and analysis can inform cultural
analysis and vice versa.
Participants: Ben Trott, Tadzio Mueller, Fiona Jeffries, Chris Hurl,
Marco Deseriis, Annette Wachholtz-Maguire, John Duda, Dalton Anthony
Jones, Verity Burgmann, Brian Brown, Michael Goddard
The legendary Dutch anarchist movement Provo staged political and
cultural interventions into the symbolic and everyday spaces of Holland
from 1965 – 1967. The rise and fall of Provo stretches from
early
Dutch “happenings” staged in 1962 to the
“Death of
Provo” in 1967. Although a small group they cast a
disproportionately large shadow on the events of the time due to their
skillful analysis of social unrest among Dutch youth. By tying
their political program to the rich magical heritage of
Amsterdam’s bohemian subculture they created political street
theater that captured the pulse of Amsterdam’s population.
Come join us to celebrate the release of Provo: Amsterdm’s
Anarchist Revolt by Richard Kempton, the first book length English
history and analysis of Provo. We will be joined by several of the
members of Provo including Nico van Apeldoorn, Eljakim Borkent, Eric
Duivenvoorden, Hans Plomp, and Arie Taal. The evening will include
appearances by members of
Radio
Joy as well as
recently recovered and translated video footage from the period. We
will explore the history and activities of Provo, tracing out their
legacies and continuing influence in the realm of autonomist politics
and ludic interventions in public space.
As a novelist and fiction SF writer, JG Ballard developed one of the
most dynamic (and disturbing) exploration of collective
psychopathology, excesses in organizational life, and the collapsing of
the Western imaginary. From the fetish of the car crash to obscene
hidden violence of the business park, internment camps to masochist
fantasies directed through the mediated form of Ronald
Reagan’s
body, Ballard’s work ventures into territories that are
disconcerting to explore, but from which one can learn a great deal.
Rather than assuming that disorder and excess is a condition that
management and organization must respond to, this event will explore
the proposition that what might really be psychopathological is the
desire to impose order upon an inherently ungovernable and excessive
condition.
