untitled - echo gone wrong

COLOPHON

Johanna Blakley, Andrea Büttner, EAA photography department, Edward Comor, Amy Cuddy, Cultural Endowment of Estonia, Daugavpils Mark Rothko Art Centre, Carol Duncan, EKKM, Estonian Contemporary Art Development Center, Marten Esko, Jaan Evart, Finnish Institute in Estonia, AS Folger Art, Gambling Tax Council, William Gibson, Hank Herron, Rob Horning, Jan Mot, Kaasaegse Kunsti Eesti Keskus, Liis Kalmet, Alan Kirby, Luka Knezevic-Strika, Greta Koppel, Sandra Kosorotova, Barbara Kruger, KUNST.EE, Laura Kuusk, Kadri Laas, Leho Laja, Hotel L’Ermitage OÜ, Gil Leung, Lugemik, Ministry of Culture of Estonia, Darja Nikitina, Nordic Council of Ministers’ Office in Estonia, Open Source Ecology, Tõnu Pekk, Cayce Pollard, Positiiv, QP Trükikoda OÜ, Kristel Raesaar, James Richards, Buzz Rickson’s, Jeremy Rifkin, George Ritzer, Rockstar Games, Mark Rothko, Rundum, Liina Siib, Karl Smith, Johannes Säre, Tallinn Photomonth, Temnikova & Kasela Gallery, Philippe Thomas, Those who wish to remain anonymous, Uber, Daniel Vaarik, Mart Vainre, Reimo Võsa-Tangsoo, Õllenaut, Kohei Yoshiyuki, Yossi Milo

ISBN 978-9949-38-614-7 (print)ISBN 978-9949-38-615-4 (pdf)

Essays

Prosumer: An Introduction ................................................. David Raymond Conroy Postmodern Theory and Internet ....................................................... George RitzerCapitalism is making way for the age of free ...................................... Jeremy RifkinWork and Money ............................................................................. Barbara KrugerIndustrial Pornography ........................................................................... Alan KirbyThings are Circulating ............................................................................... Gil LeungDigital prosumption and alienation ................................................. Edward ComorLessons from Fashions Free Culture ................................................ Johanna BlakleyKnow Your Product .............................................................................. Rob HorningAbout ..................................................................................... Open Source Ecology

Images

Images in Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment (detail) ............. Andrea BüttnerA still from Your Body Language Shapes Who You Are ........................... Amy CuddyStudy for Getty Tomb .......................................................................... Hank HerronA still from William Eggleston—Chromes (Volume 2) .............. Luka Knezevic-StrikaVessels and Tools_wrapper ....................................................................... Gil LeungThe cult of the school of anti …........................................................... Cayce PollardA still from Radio at Night .............................................................. James RichardsOrca ........................................................................ Rockstar Games & Karl SmithUntitled (Red, Orange) .................................... Daugavpils Mark Rothko Art CentreTwo locations for the exhibition .................................................................. RundumStudy for exhibition furniture .................................................................... Liina Siibreadymades belong to everyone ..................................................... Philippe ThomasUntitled, 1971, from the series The Park ......................................... Kohei Yoshiyuki

PROSUMER: An Introduction

We are all simultaneously producing and consuming all the time, but perhaps we don’t think about it much, at least I often forget. When we use an ATM machine, share content on social media, or design a new pair of customised trainers for ourselves; even when we do something as simple as prepare a meal: we consume our own labour. Recently, a word started to appear to describe someone engaged in these activities—the prosumer.

Technically it is a portmanteau, a blend of two words. The thing is, one cannot be sure which words, exactly. Whilst the second half of prosumer comes from ‘consumer’, the first half could be taken from ‘professional’ or ‘producer’ or ‘product’, or even ‘proactive’. Thus, as prosumers we are always consumers, but the corresponding, generative position has multiplied, fractured, and become more complex. Can consumption ever be truly proactive? Are we professionals or not? Do we have a product to sell, or is the product us? What happens when we, the eternally correct customer, have to deal with ourselves, the small business owner with a staff of one?

I used to think that artists were people who made things, almost out of nothing, or out of their imaginations at least. I don’t really think that anymore. Poststructuralism and postmodernism have taught us to baulk the notion of originality. At the same time, when I look at art, looking for the new is a big part of what excites me. But where can this newness be found? It is often looked for in the most obvious of places, an artwork that employs a new technology or a novel technique. Or it is looked for in history, where we can dust off something proven once but now forgotten, or, better yet, just barely seen on some periphery of the past. But these strategies have always felt, for me, less to do with the new and more to do with the now, of which nothing is more certain nor more fleeting. It seems more rewarding to try and look in stranger places, or perhaps to look again to see if that quality of newness might be found not in an object, but in a relationship. Of course it feels important to say that, like production and consumption, a relationship is about exchange—both sides have to do some work if it is going to go anywhere.

So, the works in this exhibition have been brought together to enable the many interplays that evolve when we are experiencing objects with the special

PROSUUMER: sissejuhatus

Me kõik toodame ja tarbime samaaegselt, kuid ei mõtle ehk sellele kuigi palju – vähemalt mina unustan tihti. Pangaautomaati kasutades, jagades pilte sotsiaalmeedias või endale internetipoes ainulaadset tossupaari kujundades; isegi tehes midagi nii lihtsat nagu toidu valmistamine, tarbime iseenda tööd. Hiljuti on tekkinud sõna, mis kirjeldab sellistesse tegevustesse haaratuid: „prosuumer” (ingl „prosumer”).

Tehniliselt on tegu koondsõnaga, mis liidab kaks sõna. Imelikul moel ei saa olla päris kindel, mis need liidetavad on. Kui prosuumeri teine pool pärineb sõnast „tarbija” (ingl „consumer”) , siis esimene pool võib tulla „professionaalsest”, „tootjast” („producer”), „tootest” („product”) või isegi „proaktiivsest”. Seega on prosuumerid alati tarbijad, kuid nende teine külg on killustunud ja keerukas. Kas tarbimine saab kunagi olla tõeliselt proaktiivne? Oleme me professionaalid või mitte? Kas meil on toode, mida müüa, või oleme äkki ise tooteks? Mis juhtub, kui püüdlike tarbijatena peame tegema tehinguid iseendaga – ühe töötajaga äriettevõtte ainuomanikuga?

Varem arvasin, et kunstnikud loovad midagi peaaegu eimillestki või siis vähemalt oma kujutlusvõimest. Enam ma nii ei mõtle. Poststrukturalism ja postmodernism on õpetanud originaalsuse idees kahtlema. Samas kunsti vaadates käivitab mind suuresti just uue otsimine. Kuid kust uudsust leida? Tihti otsitakse seda kõige ilmsematest kohtadest – näiteks kunstiteostest, mis kasutavad uut tehnoloogiat või uutmoodi tehnikat. Või proovitakse seda leida minevikust, pühkides tolmu mõnelt unustatud menukilt või veelgi parem – mineviku seni avastamata ääremailt. Kuid need strateegiad ei ole minu arvates seotud mitte niivõrd uue kui just praeguse hetkega, millest miski pole selgem ja samas haaramatum. Mulle endale tundub tulemuslikum otsida uut ootamatutest kohtadest või vaadata värske pilguga asju, mis on kogu aeg me silme all olnud - leida uudsust mitte asjadest, vaid suhetest. Muidugi on oluline märkida, et nii nagu tootmise ja tarbimise puhul, nii on ka iga muu suhte keskmes vahetus – mõlemad osalised peavad panustama, et miskit juhtuks.

Niisiis, siinsele näitusele kogutud asjad hakkavad omavahel mängima siis, kui osutame neile erilist, muuseumi keskkonnast tulenevat tähelepanu.

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kind of attention afforded by the atmosphere of a museum.

There are a number of logics at play here, all of which are different but they are all somehow interrelated; different sides of the same shape. With her posters, Andrea Büttner has illustrated Kant’s third Critique. By inviting us to see her develop an understanding of Kant, they create a way for us to relate to both the artist and the philosopher. The posters are not trying to educate any more than someone inviting you to watch the sunset is trying to teach you about astronomy or beauty. They carry within them as much love and engagement as Luka Knezevic-Strika’s YouTube videos, which exist simply for him to share the contents of some hard-to-find, expensive books by the photographer William Eggleston. And they carry as much dedication as Cayce Pollard’s MA-1 bomber jacket, manufactured by exacting Japanese clothing company Buzz Ricksons to precisely replicate something that never existed. Is replicate even the right word here? In William Gibson’s book Pattern Recognition, in which Pollard appears, he describes this jacket as ‘an imitation more real somehow than that which it emulates’. That same hyperreal quality appears again and again throughout the exhibition, in Hank Herron and his replica Frank Stella paintings or in Karl Smith’s photographs taken within the video game Grand Theft Auto V. The vague strangeness which pervades these things finds an odd counterpoint in a reproduction of a Mark Rothko painting, produced by the Daugavpils Rothko Art Centre, to stand in for something it itself is championing as transcendentally authentic. By not being the thing that it imitates, it reminds us of the qualities of its referent better than that original ever could.

The relationship between being shown and watching rendered so plainly in Knezevic-Strika’s videos returns in Kohei Yoshiyuki’s photographs in a much more discomforting form. Yoshiyuki’s “The Park” series of photographs captures groups of men as they watch young lovers illicitly copulate in the night air. These photographs have re-emerged in recent years and brought with them discussions about voyeurism and the viewer’s confederacy with the photographer and the other Peeping Toms. What seems truly strange in these images, though, is the apparent lack of self-consciousness of everyone involved. Be it the couples or the voyeurs, not one person seems in any way ‘caught’ in the act. The complicity of those photographed begs the question: might it not be the case that here we are

Minu jaoks toimivad näitusel korraga erinevad, kuid omavahel seotud loogikad – justkui sama kuju erinevad tahud. Andrea Büttner illustreerib oma plakatitega Kanti kolmandat kriitikat – leian, et ta ütleb nendega midagi keerukat ja olulist. Kutsudes meid jälgima, kuidas tema on enese jaoks lahti mõtestanud Kanti, lubavad need postrid meil suhestuda nii kunstniku kui ka filosoofiga. Plakatite eesmärk ei ole kedagi harida – samamoodi nagu keegi ei kutsu sind päikeseloojangut vaatama, et jagada õpetust astronoomiast või ilust. Plakatid kannavad endas sama palju armastust ja huvi nagu Luka Knezevic-Strika YouTube’i video, mis lihtsalt jagab fotograaf William Egglestoni haruldasi ja kallihinnalisi raamatuid. Nad kannavad endas sama palju pühendumust kui Cayce Pollardi MA-1 lendurijakk, mida valmistades Jaapani rõivafirma Buzz Rickson’s kopeeris pedantselt midagi, mida ei ole kunagi eksisteerinud. Kas kopeerimine on siinkohal üldse õige sõna? William Gibsoni raamatus „Pattern Recognition” („Mustrituvastus”), mille peategelane Pollard on, on jakki kirjeldatud „imitatsioonina, mis on reaalsem kui see, mida ta jäljendab”. Sarnane hüperreaalne kvaliteet ilmutab ennast näitusel üha uuesti: Hank Herroni koopiates Frank Stella maalides ning Karl Smithi fotodes, mis on pildistatud videomängus Grand Theft Auto V. Nende ebamäärane võõristus leiab ootamatu kontrapunkti Daugavpilsi Mark Rothko Kunstikeskuse poolt tellitud reproduktsioonis Rothko maalist, mille ülesandeks on asendada midagi, mida keskus ise pakub välja transtsendentaalselt autentsena. Mitte olles see, mida ta imiteerib, tuletab koopia meile oma tähistatava omadusi paremini meelde, kui originaal seda eales suudaks.

Näitamise ja vaatamise suhe, mida Knezevic-Strika videod nii lihtsalt väljendavad, jääb meid kummitama Kohei Yoshiyuki fotodel. Yoshiyuki fotoseeria „Park” jäädvustab mehi, kes piiluvad, kuidas noored armastajad salaja öösel vabas õhus vahekorda astuvad. Need fotod on viimastel aastatel uuesti tähelepanu pälvinud ja andnud ainest aruteludeks vuajerismist ja fotograafi ning piilurite jagatud huvidest. Kõige veidram neil piltidel on see, et asjaosalised pole vähemalt näiliselt üldse kohmetunud. Ei seksijad ega piilurid näe välja, nagu nad oleksid teolt „tabatud”. Pildile jäänute kaasosalus tekitab küsimuse: kas võib olla, et me kõik kasutame üksteist ekshibitsionismi ja jälgimise pöörises?

Erakordselt populaarses TEDi loengus sisendab Amy Cuddy meile lisaks „fake it till you make it” motole ka põhimõtet, et „teeskle, kuni usud

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all using each other in a confluence of exhibition and observation?

In Amy Cuddy’s enormously popular TED talk, she coaches us not just to ‘fake it till we make it’—she urges us to ‘fake it til we believe it’. Of course, as is so often the case with TED media, Cuddy is primarily proposing another recipe for success, but the blurring of performance and the ideas about the objectification of the self appear across many of the works. When Gibson describes how Cayce’s jacket, for him, became a character, might he be implying that products and people can easily become interchangeable? Although at first glance this seems abhorrent, whether it is so clearly a bad thing is not certain. The devotion given to an object at the point of manufacture has led to the creation of some incredible, important things—great works of art for instance—and it is as easy to go away from Cuddy’s lecture feeling inspired as it is to feel deeply disturbed by the idea of treating one’s own body as a tool to be manipulated for optimal market performance.

Gil Leung’s Vessels and Tools expands in a space between Cuddy’s proposition for an effective body and Pollard’s allergy to legibility. From the light box that no longer has any content to illuminate, to the effort at standardization we hear in the recording of a church organ being cleaned and tuned, to the accompanying text, the work circles around questions of desire and agency, what it is to make nothing in order for it to be everything for someone else.

Over the course of Liina Siib’s video of a mineral water bottling plant, we start to question: is the machine in the service of the worker or is it the other way around? The relentless clatter of the looping production line takes on a strangely metaphorical turn when we know that the accompanying soundtrack is provided by Amon Duul II, a German krautrock band who became a commercial rock group in order to fund the life of the political commune the band were a part of. James Richards’ latest video is formally similar, also overlaying an edited stream of images with a single piece of music. However, the tone could not feel more different. Richards works like a composer, using a collage of material culled from different sources to create his sensual videos—in this case a dreamlike homage to fellow filmmaker Derek Jarman.

For the duration of the exhibition, one gallery within EKKM will operate as a host for the artist-

isegi”. Nagu tihti TEDi puhul ikka, müüb Cuddy lihtsalt järjekordset eduretsepti, kuid segu enese objektistamisest ja esitusest ilmneb teistegi tööde puhul. Kui Gibson kirjeldab, kuidas Cayce’i jakk tema jaoks omaette tegelaseks muutus, siis kas ta mitte ei vihja, et tooted võivad inimesi kergesti asendada? Kuigi esmapilgul võib see tunduda koletuna, aga ehk pole see üheselt halb nähtus. Jäägitu pühendumus objektile tootmisprotsessis on aidanud luua erakordseid, olulisi asju – näiteks suurepäraseid kunstiteoseid. Cuddy loeng võib olla inspireeriv, aga mõte kohelda oma keha töövahendina, mida parema turusoorituse nimel kohandada tuleb, võib olla samas sügavalt häiriv.

Gil Leungi installatsioon „Anumad ja tööriistad” laiub kusagil Cuddy tõhusa keha käsitluse ja Pollardi loetavuse-vastase allergia vahel. Alates tühjast valguskastist, mis enam midagi ei valgusta, ning ühtlustamise püüdest, mida kuuleme kirikuoreli häälestamise salvestuses, kuni installatsiooni saatva tekstini – kogu teos tiirleb iha ning agentsuse küsimuste ümber. Mis tunne on luua eimidagi, mis samas on kellegi teise jaoks kogu maailm?

Liina Siibi mineraalvee villimistehase videot vaadates tekib küsimus: kas masin on töötaja teenistuses või vastupidi? Lõputult ringleva tootmisliini lakkamatu klirin muutub metafooriks kui saame teada, et saatev heliriba pärineb Amon Düül II-lt - Saksa krautrock’i bändilt, mis rahastas kommertslugudega poliitilist kommuuni, kuhu bänd kuulus. James Richardsi uusim video on formaalselt sarnane: lakkamatule kujutistevoolule on samuti taustaks üksik muusikapala. Kuid kahe teose meeleolu on väga erinev. Richards töötab nagu helilooja, kasutades oma sensuaalsete videote jaoks erinevatest allikates pärit materjalide kollaaži– siin on selleks unenäoline kummardus filmikunstnik Derek Jarmanile.

Kogu näitusel kestel pakub üks EKKMi saal peavarju Rundumi projektiruumile. See ruum toimib omamoodi sotsiaalmeedia seinana: lubades Rundumil hõivata ja kasutada tükikest kinnisvara ning näituse sotsiaalset võrgustikku, toimib see platvormina, kus rühmitus saab tutvustada omi projekte, pidada avalikke vestlusringe või lihtsalt lõigata kasu olemasolevast raamistusest. Kuigi Rundumil on galeriiruumi täitmiseks vabad käed, kaasneb sellega üks tingimus: nad peavad näitama Prantsuse kunstniku Philippe Thomas’ plakatit, mis reklaamib Thomas’ bürood „readymades belong to everyone” („readymade’id kuuluvad kõigile”). Plakati kujundas reklaamibüroo Chiat/Day/Mojo,

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run space Rundum. This gallery operates as a kind of a social media site: by allowing Rundum to occupy and utilise a piece of real estate as well as the show’s network, it acts as a platform for the group to promote their projects, hold public discussions, or to simply allow them to benefit from an existing framework. Whilst the gallery is theirs to fill with whatever content they wish, the freedom comes with a condition: they must display a poster by the French artist Philippe Thomas. The poster, an ad for Thomas’ agency readymades belong to everyone, was produced by the advertising company Chiat/Day/Mojo after they won a competition, conceived by Thomas, to produce the advertising for a group exhibition Art & Publicité at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, which he had been invited to contribute to in 1990.

All of the people and objects in this exhibition showed me something new, but did so by using something that was already at play. What I’m thinking of isn’t quite appropriation and it isn’t quite outsourcing; it isn’t quite quotation and neither is it modification. The works in the show take us somewhere else, somewhere a little more unmapped. Somewhere that, to me at least, having lived with these works for some time now, still feels complicated and urgent. The mutually parasitic relationship between the producer and the consumer is certainly not new, it is something fundamental. What Web 2.0 brought with it when it streamlined those two words into one was a new way for us to relate to ourselves. If we have to produce more, work harder, work longer for less pay in order to buy from ourselves the things we want, will we ever get the chance to enjoy the fruits of our labour, or will we just convince ourselves that the fruit is in labour itself?

David Raymond Conroy

mis võitis Thomas’ korraldatud võistluse, et leida osalustöö Pariisi Pompidou keskuses 1990. aastal toimunud näitusele „Art & Publicité”.

Kõik näitusel osalevad inimesed ja esemed on mulle näidanud midagi uut, kasutades midagi, mis oli juba varem olemas. Ma ei pea silmas apropriatsiooni ega ka alltöövõttu; samuti ei ole otseselt tegu tsitaadi ega töötlusega. Näitusel eksponeeritud tööd suunavad meid kuhugi mujale, kohta, mis on vähem kaardistatud. Kohta, mis, olles nende töödega mõnda aega elanud, tundub mulle endiselt kompleksne ja ajakohane. Tootja ja tarbija vastastikkune parasiitsuhe ei ole kindlasti uus avastus, kuid selles on midagi fundamentaalset. Neid sõnu ühildades andis web 2.0 meile uue viisi iseendaga suhestumiseks. Kui peame tootma rohkem, töötama rohkem ja töötama kauem väiksema tasu eest, selleks et osta asju – kas saame siis kunagi oma töö vilju nautida või peame ennast lihtsalt veenma, et töö ise ongi ihaldatud vili?

David Raymond Conroy

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Postmodern Theory and InternetGeorge Ritzer

Our understanding of the Internet, social networking, and the role of the prosumer in them is greatly enhanced by analyzing them through the lens of a number of ideas associated with postmodern theory.

There is, for example, Richard Rorty’s (1979) argument that the goal in any conversation, including those that characterize science, is not to find the “truth” but simply to keep the conversation going. The Internet is a site of the kinds of conversations envisioned by Rorty. It is a world in which there is rarely, if ever, an answer, a conclusion, a finished product, a truth. Instead, there are lots of ongoing conversations and many new ideas and insights. The Internet is a world devoted to keeping the conversation going. Prime examples of this include wikis in general and Wikipedia in particular, blogs and social networking sites. Google’s index is “constantly under development and can never result in a final, fixed directory of online content” (Bruns 2008: 175). All are sites that involve open-ended processes that admit of no final conclusion.

Postmodernists tend to decenter whatever they analyze and to focus on the periphery. One searches in vain for the center of the Internet in general or social networking sites in particular. They are all multi-faceted and always in the process of being made. As a result, even if a center could be found (and it can’t), it would immediately change. Internet sites are “networked structures [that] necessarily shift power away from the core, the tall peak, and towards the periphery” (Bruns, 2008: 274). Chris Anderson’s (2006) “long tail” reflects this kind of decentering. Instead of focusing on a few “hits”, blockbusters, or best sellers, the long tail involves an emphasis on the infinitely larger number of phenomena (e.g. books, music productions) that are part of the long tail.

The work of Jean Baudrillard offers a treasure trove of ideas that are very useful in thinking about the Internet and Web 2.0. Implosion involves the “contraction into each of other, a fantastic telescoping, a collapsing of the two traditional poles into one another” (Baudrillard, 1983: 57). The possibility of implosion is enormous in the digital world; the digitality of phenomena makes them much more amenable to imploding into one another; there are no physical barriers to limit, at least for very long, implosion in the that world. It is this, of course, that lies at the heart of the ability to remix and mashup sound, photos, text and much else on Web 2.0.

Postmodern Theory and Internet ……………………………………………….……………… George Ritzerhttps://georgeritzer.wordpress.com/2012/11/13/postmodern-theory-and-internet/

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Then there is Baudrillard’s (1983: 4) most famous idea of simulations and his argument that we live in “the age of simulation”. Simulations are copies, even copies of copies. This ideas of copies is particularly relevant in the Internet age which is a world, as Shirky ( 2008: 59) argues, of “unlimited, perfect copyability”. The fact that copies are both unlimited and perfect (e.g. through file-sharing) makes the possibility of creating simulations on the Internet greater than ever before.

Simulations are not only copies, but they are also fakes. It is arguable that web-based locales bring the age of simulation to perhaps its highest point, at least until we see later developments on the Internet. This is epitomized by the Sims and Second Life, as well as other artificial life simulations and games of various sorts. There are few, if any, material realities that restrict the ability to create simulations in these worlds; indeed, there is nothing in these worlds but simulations.

That means they beautifully illustrate another of Baudrillard’s ideas, hyperreality. The hyperreal is more real than real, as well as being more beautiful than beautiful, truer than true; it is beyond reality in every way. The Internet involves sites that are more more real than comparable sites in the material world. Amazon.com has infinitely more books on sale than a bricks-and-mortar book stores and no parking lot based flea market can compare to the offerings on eBay. Baudrillard would have been astounded at the hyperreal sex available on many sites on the Internet. Remixes and mashups of photographs, videos, and the like are well-suited to producing pornographic images that are more real than real.

Ultimately, Baudrillard (1990/1993: 6) sees us as living in the fractal age where things proliferate endlessly and expand in a viral or cancerous way. They have no goal other than endless proliferation. This is postmodern in the sense that the modern world was supposed to have an end or goal; the postmodern world does not. The Internet is legendarily viral with all sorts of texts and images, as well as viruses and spam, proliferating endlessly. description here fits the Internet perfectly, “In the end it makes everything circulate in one space, without depth, where all objects must be able to follow one after the other without slowing down or stopping the circuit” (Baudrillard, cited in Gane, 1993: 147). Everything in such a world, especially on the Internet, is available for communication, banalization, commercialization and consumption.

An interesting idea implicit in Baudrillard’s work is the “strength of the weak” (Genosko , 1992; 1994). In this case the weak are the individual users of the Internet and social networking sites. Their strength comes from the fact that their voices, while weak individually, become powerful when they are added together.


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Thus, for example, sites on the Internet that users visit individually can, when taken together, rise to the top when links are analyzed by algorithms such as those used by Google. More dramatically, as in the Arab Spring, powerless individuals can come together, via Facebook and Twitter, for example, and form a powerful revolutionary group.

Baudrillard (1983/1990: 59) is also concerned with the obscene where everything is made visible, broadcast, and so forth. He describes the society of his day as involving “the rampant obscenity of uninterrupted social commentary”. He also discusses “the pornography of information and communication” (Baudrillard/1990: 69) where we are “buried alive under information” (Baudrillard, 1980-1985: 90). If Baudrillard took that position three decades ago, imagine his reaction to the Internet world of the second decade of the 21st century.

Baudrillard’s most important anticipation of the current reality lies in his notion of symbolic exchange which involves the general and reversible processes of “taking and returning, giving and receiving…[the] cycle of gifts and countergifts” (Baudrillard, 1976/1993: 136). Many observers have described Web 2.0 in similar terms including Tapscott and Williams (2006) who discuss the culture of generosity that exists in that context. Baudrillard anticipates the world of the free (Anderson, 2009) that has been created on the Internet, especially Web 2.0. In that free domain, we do see something approaching a world dominated by symbolic exchange. Those involved offer gifts—additions to a Wikipedia entry, sharing a file, adding code to Linux, etc.—and in return they receive various gifts including the knowledge Wikipedia has to offer, files from others, and the use of Linux. This symbolic exchange also has another of the characteristics Baudrillard associates with it- reciprocity on the Internet is not limited to a specific exchange of goods, but is rather continuous and unlimited.

The postmodern ideas employed here, and many others, are ideally suited to an analysis of the Internet and Web 2.0. In fact, in many cases they seem to be more applicable today than they did when they were first created decades ago. In many ways, at least some of the postmodern social theorists can be said to have anticipated today’s (and even more tomorrow’s) realities and provided us a toolkit full of concepts to analyze that world.

Of course, we should not be satisfied with extant concepts, but rather we should use them in interaction with the new realities to create a much broader set of concepts and theories that will not only help us today, but will, hopefully, put us in a better position to analyze coming changes on the Internet and in social networking.


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Capitalism is making way for the age of free Jeremy Rifkin

Karl Marx spent a lifetime trying to uncover what he suspected were the deep contradictions that drove the capitalist system forward but that would one day lead to its demise. Although his search revealed a number of important ancillary contradictions, his focus on the relationship between the means of production, surplus value and alienated labour kept him from unmasking an even deeper paradox at the heart of the system.

In a capitalist market, governed by the invisible hand of supply and demand, sellers are constantly searching for new technologies to increase productivity, allowing them to reduce the costs of producing their goods and services so they can sell them cheaper than their competitors, win over consumers and secure sufficient profit for their investors. Marx never asked what might happen if intense global competition some time in the future forced entrepreneurs to introduce ever more efficient technologies, accelerating productivity to the point where the marginal cost of production approached zero, making goods and services “priceless” and potentially free, putting an end to profit and rendering the market exchange economy obsolete. But that’s now beginning to happen.

Over the past decade millions of consumers have become prosumers, producing and sharing music, videos, news, and knowledge at near-zero marginal cost and nearly for free, shrinking revenues in the music, newspaper and book-publishing industries.

Some of the US’s leading economists are waking up to the paradox. Lawrence Summers, former US treasury secretary, and J Bradford DeLong, professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, addressed this in August 2001, in a speech delivered before the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. Summers and DeLong focused their presentation on the new communication technologies that were already reducing the marginal (per-unit) cost of producing and sending information goods to near zero.

They began by acknowledging that “the most basic condition for economic efficiency: [is] that price equal marginal cost”, and further conceded that “with information goods the social marginal cost of distribution is close to zero”. They then went to the crux of the problem. “If information goods are to be

Capitalism is making way for the age of free ………………………………………………… Jeremy Rifkinhttp://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/31/capitalism-age-of-free-internet-of-things-economic-shift#comments

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distributed at their marginal cost of production—zero—they cannot be created and produced by entrepreneurial firms that use revenues obtained from sales to consumers to cover their [fixed set-up] costs … [companies] must be able to anticipate selling their products at a profit to someone.”

Summers and DeLong opposed government subsidies to cover up-front costs, arguing that they destroy the entrepreneurial spirit. Instead they supported short-term monopolies to ensure profits, declaring that this is “the reward needed to spur private enterprise to engage in such innovation”. They realised the trap this put them in, recognising that “natural monopoly does not meet the most basic condition for economic efficiency: that price equal marginal cost” but nonetheless concluded that in the new economic era, this might be the only practical way to proceed.

The pair had come up against the catch-22 of capitalism that was already freeing a growing amount of economic activity from the market, and threw up their hands, favouring monopolies to artificially keep prices above marginal cost, thwarting the ultimate triumph of the invisible hand. This final victory, if allowed, would signal not only capitalism’s greatest accomplishment but also its death knell.

While the notion of near-zero marginal cost raised a small flurry of attention 12 years ago, as its effects began to be felt in the music and entertainment industry and newspaper and publishing fields, the consensus was that it would likely be restricted to information goods, with limited effects on the rest of the economy. This is no longer the case.

Now the zero-marginal cost revolution is beginning to affect other commercial sectors. The precipitating agent is an emerging general-purpose technology platform—the internet of things. The convergence of the communications internet with the fledgling renewable energy internet and automated logistics internet in a smart, inter-operable internet-of-things system is giving rise to a third industrial revolution.

Siemens, IBM, Cisco and General Electric are among the firms erecting an internet-of-things infrastructure, connecting the world in a global neural network. There are now 11 billion sensors connecting devices to the internet of things. By 2030, 100 trillion sensors will be attached to natural resources, production lines, warehouses, transportation networks, the electricity grid and recycling flows, and be implanted in homes, offices, stores, and vehicles— continually sending big data to the communications, energy and logistics


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internets. Anyone will be able to access the internet of things and use big data and analytics to develop predictive algorithms that can speed efficiency, dramatically increase productivity and lower the marginal cost of producing and distributing physical things, including energy, products and services, to near zero, just as we now do with information goods.

Summers and DeLong glimpsed that as marginal costs approach zero, “the competitive paradigm cannot be fully appropriate” for organising commercial life, but admitted “we do not yet know what the right replacement paradigm will be”. Now we know. A new economic paradigm—the collaborative commons—has leaped onto the world stage as a powerful challenger to the capitalist market.

A growing legion of prosumers is producing and sharing information, not only knowledge, news and entertainment, but also renewable energy, 3D printed products and online college courses at near-zero marginal cost on the collaborative commons. They are even sharing cars, homes, clothes and tools, entirely bypassing the conventional capitalist market.

An increasingly streamlined and savvy capitalist system will continue to operate at the edges of the new economy, finding sufficient vulnerabilities to exploit, primarily as an aggregator of network services and solutions, allowing it to flourish as a powerful niche player. But it will no longer reign. Hundreds of millions of people are already transferring bits and pieces of their lives from capitalist markets to the emerging global collaborative commons, operating on a ubiquitous internet-of-things platform. The great economic paradigm shift has begun.


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Work and Money Barbara Kruger

Barbara Kruger. Work and Money. From Remote Control: Power, Cultures, and the World of Appearances. Whether rendered by hand or caught by camera, a picture is never opaque. To say that it is, to speak of mysterious evocativeness, results in just another promotional mystification. We see an image and we start guessing meanings. We can embroider stories or supposed narratives. Photography’s ability to replicate, its suggestion of evidence and claim to “truth” point to its problematic powers but also suggest a secular art which can connect the allowances of anthropology with the intimacies of a cottage industry. It is a trace of both action and comment. In my work I try to question the seemingly natural appearance of images through the textual commentary which accompanies them. This work doesn’t suggest contemplation: it initially appears forthright and accessible. Its commentary is both implicit and explicit, engaging questions of definition, power, expectation, and sexual difference. Some of us, with one or two feet in the “art world”, might think that our work is all cut out for us, while others are interested in changing the pattern and defining different procedures. Many of us work in areas outside of our art production. Whether out of necessity or adventure, we are at the same time secretaries, paste-up people, billing clerks, carpenters, and teachers. At times our jobs inform our work and vice versa. For instance, teaching, which is a collective process within the hierarchies of education and academia, intervenes in the production of cultural work. Art schools reproduce artists and, in turn, art. It’s all work. And most people work for money. But unlike laborers who sell moments of their lives for a short reprieve at the end ( the awaited or dreaded retirement), artists buy work time with job money. Of course, whether this routine is really necessary depends on the good or bad fortune of your fortune: whether you must really work for your money or are merely waiting to inherit it. Money talks. It starts rumors about careers and complicity and speaks of the tragedies and triumphs of our social lives. It makes art. It determines who we fuck and where we do it, what food we eat, whether we are cured or die, and what kind of shoes we wear. On both an emotional and economic level, images can make us rich or poor. I’m interested in work which addresses that power and engages both our criticality and our dreams of affirmation. 1981

Work and Money ……………………………………………………………………………… Barbara Krugerhttp://breakingnewts.blogspot.be/2011/09/barbara-kruger.html

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Industrial Pornography Alan Kirby

It’s the early 1950s, or 1850s. You are walking alone through a wood on a mild spring or summer day. From a distance you espy a couple. They are having sex. What do you actually see? Or try this. It’s the 1900s, or 1940s. One afternoon, alone, you glance from your window. Across the way the drapes are almost wholly drawn, but there’s a gap, and from the angle you’re looking along the gap leads in to a mirror on a wall, and as chance would have it the mirror reflects slantwise a couple on a bed having sex. What actually do you see? And in both cases, suppose the couple is averagely self-conscious, neither furtive nor exhibitionist. And that you feel nothing: not curiosity, or shame, or disgust, or excitement. Your eyes are a camera. What do they record?

On one level, the answer is self-evident: you see a couple having sex, of course. More precisely, you probably see a conglomerate of limbs, a mass of hair, a jerking male behind, a quantity of physical urgency or tension. On another level, the question is paradoxical, because the total situation here of viewer and viewed (people being watched having sex) structurally replicates the ostensible reception and content of industrial pornography; but the glimpsed actions probably wouldn’t resemble those of porn at all. Why wouldn’t they?

Industrial pornography is a product, it would seem, of the 1970s; its origins lie in the heartlands of postmodernism. Yet its textual and representative peculiarities make it both emblematic of postmodernism and a precursor of digimodernism; indeed, it has shifted into the new era much more smoothly than have cinema or television. We don’t need to waste too much time on what differentiates industrial por11ography from other porn, from “erotica’’ or “art;’ and so on; these are essentially legal battles. Three points are unarguable: that there exist texts whose principal or sole aim is to stimulate sexual excitement in their consumer; that some of these texts manifest a standardization of content and a scale of distribution that can be called industrial; and that, as a generic label, “industrial pornography” is in places as smudged in its definition as, say, “the war movie” or “the landscape picture:’ The label suggests the vast scale of pornographic production and consumption over the past thirty years or so, along with the (relative) openness of its distribution and acquisition. It therefore excludes material aimed at niches, some of which, involving children or animals, is more accurately classed as recordings of torture; “pornographic” performance is, by definition, exchanged for money.

The Death of Postmodernism And Beyond ………………………………………………………… Alan KirbyAlan Kirby, Digimodernism. How New Technologies Dismantle the Postmodern andReconfigure our Culture. New York, London: Continuum, 2009, pp 75–80

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Above all, industrialization manifests itself here as a standardization of product. It is always the same poses, the same acts, its performers made to converge on a single visual type. Everything nonsexual is rigorously cut out; the “actors” or models are identified solely with their sexual attractiveness or potency. The predilection of early hard-core movies like Deep Throat for a detachable plot arc was wiped out by industrialization, which made it hard to differentiate any one title from the next. Buy a random industrial porn magazine and you will see a seemingly endless array of similar-looking individuals in the same positions; rent or buy a random industrial porn film and similar-looking people will work through the same acts methodically, systematically, with a soul-crushing repetitivity. In both cases, models and scenes are separated off by extraneous material (articles, “acting”) placed there to distinguish them from each other, and famously ignored.

From a postmodern perspective, industrial pornography is hyperrreal, the supposed reproduction of something “real” which eliminates its “original:’ The reason for the dates given in the first paragraph of this section is that industrial pornography has transformed the sexual practices of many individuals in societies where it is prevalent, recasting them in its image. Increasingly, “real” sex tries to imitate the simulacrum of industrial pornography. Moreover, its staging is often either explicitly or implicitly self-referential in a recognizably postmodern way: it has a strong sense of its own status as a representation of sex by paid performers; magazines discuss their models’ lives as professional models, film actresses gaze at the camera, and so on. The third postmodern element in this material is its frequent reliance on pastiche or parody (especially of Hollywood), as a source of ironic clins d´oeil which also help to achieve a minimum degree of product differentiation.

From a digimodernist point of view, what characterizes industrial pornography is this: it insists loudly, ceaselessly, crucially on its “reality;’ on its being “real;’ genuinely happening, unsimulated, while nevertheless delivering a content that bears little resemblance to the “real thing;’ and what distorts it is its integration of its usage, of the behavior of its user. Take a soft-core magazine photo spread of a model. As the eyes move sequentially across the images, she appears to gradually disrobe, turning this way and that, finally placing herself naked on all fours or on her back with her legs apart. Very few of the poses derive from the “natural” behavior of women eager to attract a man; and yet these images will excite many men. The spread as a whole creates, for the regarding male, the illusion of an entire sexual encounter: the most explicit images set the woman, in relation to the camera, in positions she would only adopt seconds before being penetrated. Consequently, for the regarding male, the photographed

2/5The Death of Postmodernism And Beyond ………………………………………………………… Alan KirbyAlan Kirby, Digimodernism. How New Technologies Dismantle the Postmodern andReconfigure our Culture. New York, London: Continuum, 2009, pp 75–80

woman appears to be moving ever closer to intercourse with him. And yet-here is the digimodernist point-within the logic of the photos she doesn’t actually get closer to sex with anyone at all, there’s no one else there anyway, there’s only an increasingly unclothed and eroticized woman. And nothing in the images explains why her appearance and conduct are changing that way. The images then are only intelligible, both in their content and their sequencing, by inserting into them the sexual habits of their male consumer. Otherwise, they look almost bizarre.

This process is found in hard-core movies in even more dramatic form. Here, sexual positions are adopted solely that someone can watch the performers who are adopting them, and clearly see their genitalia. Couples copulate with their bodies scarcely touching, or contort their limbs agonizingly, or favor improbable geometries, solely in order that penetration be made visible. Male ejaculation occurs outside of the woman’s body purely in order that a viewer can watch it happen (nothing in the text explains such a pleasureless act). The mechanics of hard-core industrial pornography suggest an unreal corruption, a slippage from sex as it is done and enjoyed to sex done so that someone else can enjoy seeing it, and this corruption generally has the unspoken effect of diminishing the participants’ pleasure. Such positions, the ejaculation shot, and the rest are staples of industrial pornography not because they yield unrealistically fantastic sex but because they permit unrealistically visible sex. While deformation of “known reality” for creative purposes is all but universal in the arts,·its function is doubly peculiar here: first, since the unique selling point of hard core is its documentary sexual factuality, the distortions simultaneously betray the genre’s raison d’etre and furnish its necessary cast-iron proof, making them both structurally crucial and self-destructive; and second, every one of the changes here stems specifically from the systematic and crude sexual demands of the watching consumer, not from the artfulness of the creator.

This is equally apparent in the narrative logic of industrial hard-core porn movies, which integrates their consumption, constructing itself out of the circumstances of their viewing. If viewing here is the chancy reception of sexual images, then the circumstances of the encounters seem correspondingly impromptu, the sudden couplings of virtual strangers (the pizza delivery boy or the visiting plumber and the housewife) both in their narrative context and in their presentation to the watching gaze. If viewing is voyeurism with the consent of the seen, then encounters tend to exhibitionism, sex breaking out on yachts or hilltops, in gardens, by pools, such that the viewer’s “discovery” of naked copulating bodies is mirrored by the performers’ “display;” both to the viewer and narratologically, of their nudity and their copulation. If viewing


means “happening” on other people having sex, then performers do it to fellow cast members too, accidentally entering rooms to find sex in progress, and joining in or watching. Indeed, the proportion of encounters watched from within the scene as well as from outside is striking.

Its alloyed digimodernism marks off the hard-core industrial porn film from any other movie genre, even those, like comedy or horror, which also aim to stimulate a visceral or physical response. In turn, no genre excites as powerful a reaction in its viewer, an impact that derives less from its ostensible content than from its digimodernist construction. While experienced perhaps most acutely by fans, hard-core porn tends also to have a fairly overwhelming or engulfing effect on those who find it disgusting or tawdry. That engulfing, that outflanking of the viewer is recognizably digi modernist and shared to a great extent by videogames and reality TV; each short-circuits, in a way that elicits inappropriate notions of “addiction;’ a deliberate, controlled response. We will come back to this issue later.

Its digimodernism also means that industrial pornography should be primarily seen as something that is “used” rather than “read” or “watched;’ employed as an ingredient of a solitary or shared sexual act outside of which it makes no sense or. appears ludicrous. However, it’s undeniable that, for many reasons, the viewer whose feelings, actions, sightlines, and rhythms are so efficiently uploaded into and visually integrated by industrial pornography tends to be male. There is little universality about the use of porn. Women, research suggests, initially find hard-core films as arousing as men do but lose interest much more quickly, and this may be because the movies are textually invested, in their content and sequencing, with the sexual practices, habits, and responses of an expected male viewer. It is women whose pleasure is most visibly articulated (men’s is self-contained) or whose fellatio is in all senses spectacular; it’s the woman’s body that is waxed and inflated to become something it had never previously needed to be: exciting to stare at during sex. However, textual conventions (regular, monotonous) must be separated here from their possible reception (perhaps wayward, unexpected): ·it is not because industrial pornography reinvents lesbianism solely as an object of male regard, for instance, that some straight women don’t find it exciting. This discussion is about textuality, not consumption.

The digimodernism of industrial pornography is doubly partial: it coexists with its postmodernism (an interesting contribution to debates about their relationship); and the viewer (textually male) does not determine or contribute to the content or sequencing of the material by any conscious act. His sexuality, abstracted


from him and inserted in heightened form into what he is regarding, “writes” what he sees through the intermediary of someone else’s hand-the director’s-which guides his metaphorical pen. Sitting in a ferment before these images he doubtless does not know or care why they are the way they are, nor why he is responding so intensely. Entranced, his digimodernist autism overpowers his individuality just as, functionally, industrial pornography relies on anonymity: the obvious pseudonyms of the performers, and equally of the consumers whose experiences contributed to Laurence O’Toole’s book Pornocopia. On his acknowledgments page O’Toole thanks, increasingly ridiculously, “‘Nicholas White,’ ‘Jonathan Martin,’ ‘Kate,’ . . .’Burkman,’ ‘Shamenero,’. . . ‘bbyabo,’ ‘dander,’ ‘knife,’ . . . ‘Chaotic Sojourner,’ ‘Thumper,’ ‘Ace:,’. . . ‘thunder,’ ‘Sacks,’ ‘Demaret,’ ‘Tresman,’ ‘der Mouse,’ . . . ‘billp,’ ‘Gaetan,’ ‘Zippy,’ ‘Zennor,’ ‘Imperator,’”1. They resemble, tellingly, the names of Internet UGC contributors or characters in movies heavy with CGI (computer-generated imagery). O’Toole himself may well be a punning pseudonym for all I know. Paradoxically, industrial pornography hides actual people away, and the reverse is also true: for Michael·Allen it is the “great ‘unsaid”’ of Hollywood, while academics have long complained of the impossibility of getting funding for research for it.2 The number of adults prepared to admit they enjoy it is a fraction of the true figure. Socially, no other form is so omnipresently occluded, so popular and disreputable, so centrally marginalized.

1 Laurance O’Toole, Pornocopia: Porn, Sex, Technology and Desire, 2nd edition. London: Serpent´s Tail, 1999, p. vii. Both well researched and naive, O’Toole’s book reflects the immence difficulties intelligent discussion of pornography faces, caused, to a great extent, by the form´s digimodernist shattering of conventional meta-textual categories. 2 Michael Allen, Contemporary US Cinema. Harlow: Pearson, 2003, p. 162.


Things are Circulating Gil Leung

In 1971 Roland Barthes stated in ‘From Work to Text’ that the text, as opposed to the work, “is that space where no language has a hold over any other, where languages circulate (keeping the circular sense of the term).” Text here has a primary status as productive, a perpetual site of practice where things move around, circulate, before they ossify in works. Whereas “the work can be held in the hand, the text is held in language, [it]1 only exists in the movement of a discourse.” Though there are many works that can be enjoyed, Barthes’ claim is that this pleasure is only one of consumption, whereas the pleasure associated with the text is productive, “a pleasure without separation.”2 Such a prioritising of discursive production over material consumption replicates and deviates some forty years later, Chris Kraus proposing in her essay ‘Indelible Video’, that “the most desired plateau is not the stability once implied by the object, but perpetual flux. Far more creativity goes into the marketing of products than into the products themselves. Likewise, the fact of the disappeared object is key to conceptual art, a term that is oxymoronic: all art now, is conceptual, deriving its value only through context, at a second remove.”3 In this sense, the circulation and marketing, the discourse around a work is of more, let’s say, pleasure, than the object work, a disappearance that could stand to constitute production itself as a new object of consumption.

I was recently told by someone that their work, meaning their practice, was so enjoyable that they had no need for leisure time. Work being this pleasurable also seemed to necessitate that they were badly paid and, in fact, that they sustained their practice by working another job. Such a logic tends to switch the positions of production and consumption, paying to work rather than working for pay. Obviously, in this scenario, there are just two types of working going on, paid and bought, except what is being bought is production time. But perhaps buying something, especially one’s own labour, doesn’t necessarily mean consuming it. And in addition perhaps we shouldn’t immediately relegate consumption to a position of futility or weakness. For Barthes, the lack felt in the pleasure of consumption was linked with a realisation that works read could not be re-written. The pleasure of the text was of this writing, of discourse and the circulation of ideas. For the double labouring prosumer, and I use this term as a way of talking about a sort of consumption that uses purchasing power to aspire to a profession, these pleasures are bought together. Not just through the purchasing of their own practice as consummate professionals, but also the inverse of this scenario,

Things are Circulating ……………………………………………………………………………… Gil Leunghttp://openfile.org.uk/archive/gil-leung-things-are-circulating/

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the production of their own consumption, as professional consumers. This configuration is not just to do with an immaterial and debt based model for labour but also because of a rights led and expert model of consuming. The disappearance of the object that Kraus links to video, necessarily promotes the utilisation of existing materials, not in order to re-write but just write; video’s form is not in circulation, it is circulation. Hence practice becomes a service and consuming becomes productive.

The issue then is less of text over work, producer over consumer, practice over distribution, but of the intimate relation between the two, between present objects and future actions. This is not an advocation of some logic of juxtaposition that premises itself upon a certain recognisability of reference, an appropriative claim or a contrary attempt at re-writing. Whether consumption and production are combined or sequential, the important thing is that their relation maintains a certain discursive tension. When separate positions converge within a single practice, the site of discussion can become increasingly insular; like a conversation with several possible selves and the existent materials available. As Gertrude Stein addressed in her 1925 text ‘Composition as Explanation’4 the task of making work is compositional, one of distribution and temporality, where and when rather than what a work is. It is the composition of elements, their presentation or presentness that will constitute the work as any sort of textual circulating thing. In this sense, the perpetual attempt to materialise the pleasure of text is less about how many different formal versions of a work exist but rather the way in which its presence might stave off ossification. Counter intuitively, it seems as if the circulation of language occurs at the point where the work stands its own ground. Circulation is not a result of keeping the work moving but because we move with and against it.

1 Rivette, Jacques. ‘Interview with Jacques Rivette’, April 1973. Conducted by Bernard Eisenschitz, Jean-Andre Fieschi and Eduardo de Gregorio. Translated by Tom Milne. Originally appeared in La Nouvelle Critique No. 63 (244), April 1973. Published in Jacques Rivette: Texts and Interviews (British Film Institute, 1977).

“A film is always presented in a closed form: a certain number of reels which are screened in a certain order, a beginning, an end. Within this, all these phenomena can occur of circulating meanings, functions and forms; moreover, these phenomena can be incomplete, not finally determined once and for all. This isn’t simply a matter of tinkering, of something mechanical constructed from the outside, but rather— to refer back to what I was saying at the beginning—of something that has been ‘generated’ which seems to entail biological factors. It isn’t a matter of making a film or a work that exhausts its coherence, that closes in on itself; it must continue to function, and to create new meanings, directions and feelings… Here one comes back to the Barthes definition. I refer to Barthes a good deal, but I find that he speaks more lucidly than anyone else at the present time about this kind of problem… and he says: there is a text from the moment one can say: things are circulating. To me it is evident that this potential in the cinema is allied to the semblance of monumentality we were just talking about. What I mean is that on the screen the film presents a certain number of events, objects, characters in quotes, which are closed in on themselves, turned inward, exactly as a statue can be, presenting themselves without immediately


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stating an identity, and which simultaneously establish comings-and-goings, echoes, among one another.” Sourced from http://www.jacques-rivette.com/.

2 Barthes, Roland, ‘From Work to Text’, 1971, translation Copyright 1977, Stephen Heath. Sourced from http://areas.fba.ul.pt/jpeneda/From%20Work%20to%20Text.pdf

3 Kraus, Chris, ‘Indelible Video’, 2011. Sourced from http://www.semiotexte.com/?p=683

4 Stein, Gertrude, ‘Composition as Explanation’ 1925. There is at present there is distribution, by this I mean expression and time, and in this way at present composition is time that is the reason that at present the time-sense is troubling that is the reason why at present the time-sense in the composition is the composition that is making what there is in composition.” Sourced from http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/essay/238702


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Digital prosumption and alienation Edward Comor

Since the hybrid producer-consumer—the prosumer—was conceptualized three decades ago, prosumption has been embraced by both mainstream and progressive analysts. With digital technologies enabling more people to engage in an array of online prosumption activities, one shared claim is particularly striking: the empowering and humanizing implications of prosumption will mark the end of human alienation. In this paper, I assess this extraordinary prediction by, first, establishing that the core of Marx’s conceptualization of alienation is capital’s dominance over human relations, compelling people to become mere tools of the production process. Second, I assess both general and specific digital prosumption developments in light of this understanding of alienation. Third, my analysis concludes that people will participate in prosumption in at least three discernible ways: most will remain relatively powerless tools of capital; some will act as capital’s creative tools; and a minority (those possessing extraordinary capabilities) will have the potential to employ prosumption in ways that redress their alienation.

Introduction

In his 1980 book The Third Wave, Alvin Toffler prophesized that people soon would customize the goods and services they consume. Through their use of networked computers, he predicted that consumption would become increasingly integrated with production, distribution and exchange, so much so that power over the production process would shift into the hands of everyday people. Mass industrialization and consumption, Toffler argued, would be eclipsed by self-customization led by the hybrid producer-consumer: what he called the prosumer.

For Toffler, alienation was the outcome of Second Wave industrial society. Unlike the agrarian First Wave, Second Wave humanity was dominated by mechanized tasks and routines controlled by centralized, hierarchical interests. With the coming post-industrial Third Wave, Toffler anticipated the kinds of political, economic and sociological changes now lauded by prosumption’s progressive proponents. With the home transformed into an ‘electronic cottage’—a place in which work and leisure co-exist and the increasingly empowered prosumer wins back her freedoms and sense of self—‘the first truly humane civilization in recorded history’ is due to unfold (Toffler, 1980: 11).

Digital prosumption and alienation ………………………………………………………… Edward Comorhttp://openfile.org.uk/archive/gil-leung-things-are-circulating/

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Almost three decades later, Tapscott and Williams, in their best-seller Wikinomics (2006), further popularized prosumption as nothing less than the core activity of a new economy—one in which peer-to-peer networking and collaboration are facilitating the construction of an economic system that is innovative, creative and universally beneficial. This bold vision has been echoed by a legion of critical analysts, some using the term ‘co-creation’ instead of prosumption.1 Zwick et al., for example, write that prosumption’s exploitation of ‘the productive value of social cooperation, communication, and affect … represents a closing of the economic and ontological gap between consumption and production…’ (Zwick et al., 2009: 182). Once this is accomplished, the individual will be empowered to realize his or her potentials.2 Thus, for most proponents of prosumption, a new social order is seen to be ascendant—one characterized by a more cooperative and fulfilling life. In sum, for both mainstream and progressive analysts, the prosumer society will be a non-alienated society.

In what follows, I assess this remarkable prognostication by mapping out the theoretical parameters of prosumption (what, ideally, it does) alongside its real-world applications. In doing this, I answer the following: does the ascendancy of prosumption really mark the beginning of the end of human alienation? I begin to answer this question by detailing Marx’s conceptualization of alienation.3 I then explain how technology impacts alienation, arguing that contemporary alienation takes place when human beings act and relate to one another as tools of capital. Following this, my paper examines the impact of contemporary prosumption on alienation concluding, among other things, that digital prosumption will enable increasing numbers to become ‘creative tools’ of the production process.4

Alienation

Alienation is a condition long associated with capitalist modernity. Generally defined, it constitutes humanity’s denial of its essence. ‘Man’, writes Erich Fromm, ‘has created a world of man made things… He has constructed a complicated social machine to administer the technical machine [i.e. industrial capitalism] he built. Yet this whole creation of his stands over and above him…He is owned by his own creation, and has lost ownership of himself ’ (Fromm, 1955: 115).

To assess whether or not prosumption can redress alienation, we first need to fully articulate what alienation is and how it is related to political, economic and technological developments. For Toffler and others, it is Marx’s early


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conceptualization of alienation—most clearly articulated in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (originally published in 1844) and The German Ideology (1846)—that is challenged by prosumption.5 According to Marx the essence of humanity is its engagement in the act of self-creation. The reason for this is that human beings are distinguished from other animals because people make their own ‘nature’—they, in effect, produce the conditions of their own existence.6 People who do this are exercising their human essence; those who do not are alienated from it.

In capitalist society workers live in a state of alienation because their engagement with production is a matter of survival rather than self-creation. Most capitalists, because they fail to engage their creative powers, are even further removed from this essence. To reiterate, for Marx, the worker (or proletarian) does not produce to realize his creative powers—he produces for a wage. The capitalist (or bourgeois owner), on the other hand, does not even produce.7 Unlike the proletariat, the bourgeoisie have no hope of escaping their alienation as once they cease to own the means of production and employ others to produce they, literally, cease to be capitalists. One consequence of this is that, while the worker may aspire to end his alienation by overthrowing capitalism, the bourgeois owner is compelled to (unconsciously) embrace his alienated existence.

But why, we might ask, does the bourgeois owner fail to see her existential condition? For Marx the answer is rooted in the fact that the capitalist is not, in fact, powerless: her money and capital exert power for her.

The bourgeoisie live inescapably alienated lives as their capital (including their technologies) constitutes an artificial kind of humanity. The owner himself thus is dependent on things to express an ersatz existence. While both the worker and the capitalist are alienated, according to Marx, ‘the worker suffers in his very existence, the capitalist suffers in the profit on his dead Mammon’ (Marx, 1844: 4). In effect, the capitalist is more than just dependent on his capital—he is insulated by it.

But what of the conceptualization of alienation as, more directly, the outcome of the capitalist-worker wage labour relationship? This, surely, is the form of alienation that Toffler and others forecast will be eliminated through prosumption. From this more familiar understanding of alienation, the fact that the products of the proletariat’s labour are not owned or controlled by the worker (but, instead, by his employer) generates what can be termed product-alienation. Moreover, through the systemic drive to generate surplus


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value involving the degradation of workers, yet another form of alienation emerges—process-alienation.

In both product- and process-alienation, work is not performed to satisfy direct needs. Instead, for workers, the aim is to gain the means (the wages) required to satisfy needs through subsequent purchases. Under these conditions people are compelled to sell their capacity to labour to capitalists as if it is just another commodity—in effect, a thing. As a result, human relations become structurally disjointed as working people, especially as they become appendages to ‘the machine’ of production, have little or no direct relationship with one another or, for that matter, their own humanity (Cohen, 1968: 218-19).

Toffler and subsequent prosumption theorists anticipate a remedy to product- and process-alienation. As people come to produce what they consume, and labour becomes engaged in direct forms of exchange with others (rather than for money), the prosumer is re-connected with both other people and to her own creative essence. Johan Söderberg, to give just one contemporary example, embraces open source prosumer software as ‘a showcase of the productive force of the general intellect… It underpins’, he says, ‘the claim by Autonomist Marxists that production is becoming intensively social, and supports their case of a rising mismatch between collective labour power and an economy based on private property’ (Söderberg, 2002).8

Such optimistic conclusions are premature. One reason I say this is that arguments citing product- and/or process-alienation as core underpinnings of contemporary alienation are unsustainable—unsustainable both empirically and logically.

Recent research by Peter Archibald documents that worker alienation has not declined in relatively ‘developed’ political economies (nor has it been exported to the ‘developing’ world). Indeed, those who have escaped industrial society’s dehumanizing factories (those ‘progressing’ into service sector positions) usually live with less job security and more pervasive forms of surveillance, not to mention the daily stresses of handling, processing and acting on never-ending flows of information.9 Archibald also cites polling data in which overwhelming majorities say they either are not engaged or actively disengaged from their work. Thus, despite the much hyped rise of a new ‘creative’ economy (Florida, 2002) the empirical evidence for a decline of alienation stemming from fewer industrial occupations is, at best, uneven (Archibald, 2009).


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However, and to repeat, neither product- nor process-alienation, although important, are adequate explanations for alienation’s persistence in the twenty-first century. The fact that many contemporary workers are paid enough (or the market price of the commodity they produce is low enough) to enable them to purchase their outputs makes product-alienation itself a questionable basis on which to explain the longevity of alienation. Moreover, it is hard to deny that at least some people do in fact exercise their creativity and intelligence in the contemporary workplace. In phases of capitalism’s development and in particular sectors, the knowledge and skills of workers have been encouraged (and even relied upon)—from the artisan-based factories of the eighteenth century to software companies in the twenty-first. Typically, however, this dependence on the creativity and intelligence of employees becomes, over time, a costly problem for capitalists precisely because of their need to generate evermore surplus value. It is this dynamic, and resistance to it, that compels owners to capture and codify these intellectual capabilities through the development and use of technologies.10

Having noted these complex realities, at least some forms of alienation are more likely to be outcomes of something more fundamental. To uncover what this could be, let us dig deeper by returning to Marx’s assertion that capitalists are more profoundly alienated than their workers. Again, for Marx, the core of the matter lies in man’s removal from his self-creative essence. The fact that the capitalist owns property is what most directly distances him from others, nature and himself. Unlike the feudal lord who could not sell his property, the capitalist can. The structural conditions of feudalism compelled the lord to exist in what Marx called a ‘marriage of honour with the land’ (Marx, 1844: 26). The capitalist, on the other hand, owns things that are relatively obtuse. The lord possesses a place where he can live. The capitalist, more abstractly, owns wealth—something that, while often intangible, is always fungible. Quite unlike the feudal past, in bourgeois society personal relationships between people and property cease while ‘the domination dead matter over man’ becomes the norm (ibid.).

Not only is capital the source of the bourgeoisie’s power, it also dominates the bourgeoisie. Because, under capitalism, money, rather than personal qualities or traditional customs, gives the individual his status and power, that individual is wholly dependent on it. In this sense, according to Marx, the capitalist is not primarily a human being who intentionally seeks to control and exploit workers using capital. Instead, capital (or ‘the machine’ as Fromm puts it) itself rules. To quote Marx hypothesizing the existential reality of the capitalist, ‘I am bad, dishonest, unscrupulous, stupid; but money is honored, and hence its possessor.


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… Does not my money, therefore, transform all my incapacities into their contrary?’ (Marx, 1844: 60).

Because capital takes on faux human qualities, the bourgeois individual is not compelled to confront his alienation. The worker, on the other hand, has no such ability. Thus, to repeat, proletarians experience their alienation directly. Without the power of capital to mask this state, the worker has no means of self-delusion. It is precisely this that furnishes the proletarian with the possibility of recognizing and prospectively overcoming her alienation.

Alienation and technology

In capitalist society people are dominated by a thing—capital. Not only does capital constitute the primary medium of social intercourse, it both empowers and disempowers. This is not to say that capital itself possesses this power. Instead, capital constitutes a form of exchange involving living, breathing human beings—it is, in fact, a process through which money and use values are converted, through labour, into surplus value. Machines and technologies are core components of this process as, typically, the capitalist puts his money to use by converting it to capital, and machines and technologies are used by workers to do this.

If, as discussed above, neither product- nor process-alienation are at the heart of the general condition of alienation, what is its fundamental basis? The answer, for Marx, is still to be found in the production process (a process involving four interrelated moments—production, distribution, exchange and consumption). This entails the need to exploit labour—the need to get more for less out of the people employed in one or more aspects of the process. For the proletarian, despite the rights and freedoms associated with the wage labour contract, resisting this exploitation has been the source of ongoing class conflict (indeed, this resistance has compelled capital’s generation and application of evermore sophisticated technologies).

It is precisely this ascent of ‘dead’ labour and its implications for the ‘living’ that Marx believed propelled capitalism’s tendency to dehumanize workers, making them into little more than appendages of the techniques and technologies applied in the production process. In effect, capitalism’s compulsion to generate surplus value is what compels capitalists to treat workers as if they are machines or things. People, as a result, become tools of capital. As G.A. Cohen explains,


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The craftsman wields a tool. The individual worker cannot be said to wield a machine, for the machine of modern industry cannot be wielded… [T]he machine wields the worker, since he [Marx] conceives him as placed at its disposal, to be pushed and pulled. A machine in operation is a system in motion and the man is what is moved. But this makes it impossible to characterize the worker as a machine … The machine relates to the worker as the craftsman relates to his tool… (Cohen, 1968: 221, emphasis in original)

Cohen implicitly disavows the notion that alienation stems from the worker’s use of machinery and technology. In reality, the use of everything from knitting needles to computers to a pencil and paper in many instances may further the worker’s realization of her self-creative essence. Rather than humanity’s essence being denied as a result of using technology, a person’s essence is lost when she becomes merely a tool. To quote Marx directly: ‘Every kind of capitalist production, in so far as it is not only a labour-process, but also a process of creating surplus-value, has this in common, that it is not the workman that employs the instruments of labour, but the instruments of labour that employ the workman’ (Marx, 1887: 398-99).

Now that Marx’s theorization of alienation has been distilled, I return to prosumption to examine whether or not today’s digital technologies are being used to, in effect, liberate people from their dehumanized roles as tools in the production process.

Prosumption, production and class

To assess contemporary prosumption in light of its implications for alienation, we need to modify one aspect of Marx’s analysis. Unlike nineteenth century England, the populations of most twenty-first century capitalist societies are not always identifiable in straightforward bourgeois/proletarian terms. Significant numbers of people now are employed in so-called ‘non-productive’ occupations, innumerable workers own shares of corporations (even those they work for), and some aspire to self-employment using computers and other digital technologies as their individually-owned means of production. Given this contemporary labour force—characterized as it is by ambiguities and potential contradictions—to proceed with a Marxist analysis of alienation and prosumption we need to re-frame class itself in a way that reflects these developments.11 To do this, it is useful to reiterate Marx’s emphasis on the fact that production is a process involving four interrelated moments: production, distribution, exchange and consumption.


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One of the most attractive traits of class (and certainly one of the reasons some find it troublesome) is its flexibility. As David McLellan observes, ‘Marx has many criteria for the application of the term ‘class’ and not all of them apply all the time. The two chief criteria are relationship to the prevailing mode of production and a group’s consciousness of itself as a class with its attendant political organization’ (McLellan, 1980: 182). Yet the concept of class reflects the essence of Marx’s analysis—it is the ‘place’ in which the material conditions of historical development are linked to the thoughts and actions of human beings. With Marx, the motor of historical change lies specifically in the dynamic drive to increase surplus value and, more generally, in the ongoing contradiction between developing forces and the relations of production. In keeping with the necessarily holistic nature of this approach, and given the importance of all inter-related moments in the production process, I believe that a similarly holistic approach to class—identifying class positions in terms of both production in and the reproduction of capitalist relations—is consistent with Marx’s methodology.

The importance of this broader reading of class becomes apparent as workers, particularly in recent decades, have become more directly burdened with the costs and time pressures associated with both their own reproduction and the reproduction of the production process in toto. The constant drive to ‘re-skill’ workers now, for example, often involves individuals learning, upgrading and paying for these reproduction needs. In the home, what Ursula Huws refers to as ‘consumption work’ has steadily increased also, meaning that the techniques and technologies needed to run a household (and reproduce labour) have been domesticated. Furthermore, a growing number of workers are trying to eek out livings from labour based in their homes, mostly performing jobs that are tenuous and poorly paid. Among this ‘cybertariat’ information and communication technologies (ICTs) constitute, for neoliberal apologists at least, a means of realizing greater ‘career independence’ and perhaps a way forward becoming, potentially, entrepreneurs or commercially recognized programmers, writers or artists. Beyond the spin, the fact is that such pursuits require most to become more (not less) dependent on a network (i.e. ‘the machine’) and an economic system that operates beyond any individual’s control—a network and system that impels those seeking ‘success’ to constantly improve their skills and purchase the latest (often expensive) hardware and software commodities (Huws, 2003: 170).

A growing workforce now labouring online are engaged in prosumption activities that support various components of the production process. Recent evidence demonstrates that those most active—what a recent Forrester Research report calls the Internet’s ‘actual creators’ (defined as those who have posted


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a blog, updated a web page, or uploaded video within the past month)—constitute the minority (24 percent) (Bernoff, 2009). Among these individuals still fewer are involved in anything remotely progressive or transformative. Most, in fact, are contributing to an expanding range of promotional, entertainment and branding activities.

One widely embraced element of online prosumption is wikis—online sites with content that almost anyone can add to or modify. The largest of these is the online encyclopedia called Wikipedia. With approximately ten million registered English-language users, about 150,000 individuals modify content each month. Although the most commonly cited motivation for contributing is an interest in sharing information, routinely the site is used to promote commercial interests. And while wikis sometimes are portrayed as transcending the instrumental logic of accumulation (rekindling, for some, a pre-capitalist commons or gift economy), the historical dynamics outlined earlier suggest a different future. A profit-making company called Wikia, Inc. thus far has established (or has hosted the prosumption of) specialized wikis on more than 1,500 subjects. According to its CEO, Gil Penchina, the most popular of these concern movie franchises and video games, all of which generate revenue by linking niche market consumers to corporations, enabling the latter to engage prospective customers, utilize their free labour, and exchange information with them in order to pursue more personalized (i.e. inter-personal and ‘viral’) marketing strategies (Parfeni, 2009).

A more tangible example—one involving the production of material commodities—is LEGO’s Digital Designer software program. It enables online participants to design and build with virtual LEGO bricks. Once submitted, the player/designer is offered their own version of what has been created for a price. Virtual models can also be shared and the advice of other LEGO enthusiasts solicited. On rare occasions LEGO executives adopt a design and manufacture the product for sale in toy stores. In return, the prosumer receives ‘design recognition’ but not financial compensation (Zwick et al., 2009: 181). In this and other instances, beyond exploiting the intelligence of others and selling LEGO products, the primary objective of the Digital Designer program is marketing—marketing LEGO directly to participants, using them to market LEGO by electronically sharing their designs with friends, and utilizing participant information for future promotions.

Some might argue that such contributions are empowering in that they constitute the engagement of people in creative, productive pursuits. Millions, indeed, take part voluntarily without financial incentives. Yet, for centuries, ideas, cultural


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representations and design images either have been shared for no compensation or co-opted (simply stolen in the absence of intellectual property rights) by capitalists seeking new products and useful information (Huws, 2003: 140-42). Such creative inputs, whether or not they are remunerated, have always been core components of a production process whose ultimate aim is the realization of surplus values. In this context, both the individual paid a wage and the person providing a corporation with the intellectual labour needed for new designs, marketing strategies and commodity sales share an important commonality: both are exploited. Having recognized this, however, the more salient issue for our analysis of alienation is whether or not these contributions entail the dehumanization of participants as mere tools of the production process.

The prosumer: Capitalist tool or creative worker?

For decades, proponents of prosumption specifically and ICTs more generally have, for the most part, forecast an empowered civil society. With more people engaged in ‘immaterial labour’ or ‘knowledge work’, they argue, corporations will lose control of their traditional levers of power. Indeed, the ‘smart’ firm will consciously empower its employees using ICTs to help them become more productive and creative (Drucker, 1992; Tapscott and Williams, 2006) while, for radical observers, market pressures will compel capitalists to furnish disparately located workers with the tools needed to organize themselves in prospectively revolutionary forms (Negri, 1989).

Little empirical evidence exists to substantiate either of these flattening-of-hierarchy assumptions.12 In fact numerous studies show quite the opposite: that the ‘information society’ and prosumer-enabling technologies serve powerful interests in their efforts to increase disparities (Rule and Besen, 2007). The main reason for this is that the core structures and media of status quo relations—private property, the wage labour contract, and the price system—remain intact and pervasive. In practice, ICTs have been developed and applied in ways that have widened and deepened the reach of these very institutions.

ICTs, no doubt, have enabled organizations to shed middle-management positions, yet new technologies have also been applied to extend control over production, distribution, exchange and consumption (arguably, neoliberal globalization would not have been possible without these capabilities). Moreover, ICTs are being used to increase the monitoring and surveillance of workers, and to extend corporate control over what and how employees communicate. Globalized companies—from the Gap to McDonald’s to WalMart— now, for example, use technologies to standardize worker performance


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and interactions.13 Independent thought is also neutered through software programs that dominate website and telephone communications. As one study of these developments concludes, ‘the net effect on the intellectual content’ of information economy activities ‘is surely negative’ (ibid.: 25).

From a Marxist perspective, these developments are perfectly rational—capital, after all, is compelled to seek profits (through the realization of surplus values) by using machines (including ICTs) to manage the division of labour in all facets of the production process. This, historically, has implied the elaboration of hierarchical tendencies, involving the development of all kinds of specializations. While this process is cyclical, in that the early stages of an industry may entail a period of relative autonomy and creativity for skilled and creative workers, the competitive and systemic dynamics driving market economies repeatedly compel corporations to systematize and codify these labour inputs (Huws and Dahlmann, 2009).14 Over the longue durée, therefore, ICTs extend existing divisions between those who conceptualize and those who execute (Braverman, 1974; Huws, 2003; Ramioul, 2007).15

This pattern is well underway in the computer software industry where Taylorist principles have been applied in the production of code as component tasks are divided among teams of programmers. Not only is this taking place in private companies such as Microsoft, but fragments of open-source software are being developed by disparately located individuals. One of the best known examples of the latter is Linux.

With Linux software, the transparency of its underlying code enables a vast pool of mostly unpaid workers to assess, improve and evolve it. Their suggested revisions are sent to an assembly node where control is exercised over what (if anything) is modified. For logistical and economic reasons, one individual and his colleagues monitor this complex division of labour—Linus Torvalds and the Linux Mark Institute. According to Chopra and Dexter, in the case of Linux,

…the disciplining of labour power is an intricate affair—a delicate mix of cooperation and cooptation. Open source shows such a mixture in its co-optation of the utopian spirit of a free software model, as workers have already bought into the ideology of open source or free software production…While the education and flexibility of open source programmers make it harder for capitalists to control the labour force, control does exist. (Chopra and Dexter, 2005: 10)


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Yet the source code or ‘kernel’ of Linux is available to anyone with a copying device. There are no legal restrictions blocking individuals from selling it to others (although this is an unlikely event since it is freely available). Interests can, however, profit from Linux by building and selling services stemming from it (e.g. Redhat). However, because Torvalds formally owns the original code/kernel, new service vendors generally are compelled to cooperate with him in ways that retain and enhance his dominant position.16

Through such examples17 and, more importantly, in keeping with the historical dynamics outlined in this paper, we arrive at the following conclusion: prosumption, as an increasingly important component of the capitalist production process, employs workers/consumers as mostly unpaid but, in some cases, creative tools. This fact demonstrates why questions concerning prosumption’s implications for alienation are complex; clearly, both product- and process-alienation are commonplace but the precise nature of the prosumer’s labour varies to such a degree that prosumption, as an exploitative relationship, can also fulfill the essential drive to create.

The implications of prosumption

Because, at first blush, the prosumer appears to be aware and in control of her productive and consumptive activities, she appears to be a prospectively transcendent figure. The seemingly free and autonomous prosumer has not, however, forsaken predominant structures and relations, for how could she if private property and contract relations remain entrenched institutions, both online and off? Moreover, the prosumer’s dependency on the corporations that own, design and run the essential infrastructures through which people work and consume leaves little room for genuinely autonomous development. For the overwhelming majority—even those who possess the knowledge to write code and create software—the layers of complex expertise required to re-structure (let alone re-build) the means through which digital prosumption is practiced are (almost) beyond comprehension.18

Like the owner whose capital facilitates an ersatz humanity, we might speculate that the prosumer—often ambiguously located in terms of her class position—also may use technology to (paradoxically) distance herself from her essence. For others, probably the minority who have the financial and intellectual means to pursue their creative potentials, some forms of prosumption may be as liberating as Toffler anticipated. For these fortunate individuals digital technologies could help them transcend the status of most:


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rather than being tools of ‘the machine’, their exceptional capabilities might enable them to use ICTs as tools to redress alienation.19

But again, we should be cautious. The ongoing predominance of exchange relations (involving the commodification of both use values and human labour) ‘depends on actors repressing consciousness of the socialness of their act’ (Morris, 2001: 88. Emphasis in original). The universal institutionalization of commodified relations (i.e. the commodity form) itself mediates a repressed existence; one in which the mind sees socially constructed relations as ‘voluntary’ and ‘empowering’ (which at a lived, concrete level, they are) yet, in some fundamental respects, they are not.

Let me develop this point by elaborating what, precisely, the prosumer is producing. One way to do this is to assess the prosumer’s role in co-creating either use or exchange values—asking if her labour serves the dead world of things (exchange values) or the living world of human needs (use values)?

While all commodities entail both exchange and use values, under capitalism exchange values dominate. For prosumption to constitute a truly new direction in socio-economic relations—to, in effect, prioritize use values—prosumers will need to work primarily for their individual and collective needs directly rather than for exchange. Whether or not what is prosumed benefits the individual or the group, if the purpose and result of prosumer labour is the advancement of exchange values, status quo relations are likely to remain unchanged. To put it more simply, beyond the prosumer’s economic exploitation vis-à-vis the production process, if prosumption is a tool to make money existing relations dominated by capital will be perpetuated. On the other hand, if the prosumer creates non-commodified products and services—things crafted primarily for their material, psychological or social usefulness—those who argue that prosumption is a potentially progressive development have an intriguing point.

The difficulty of achieving such potentials can be appreciated once we comprehend how extraordinarily hard it is for alienated individuals to recognize their state of alienation before pursuing activities and relations that enable them to recognize their state of alienation! This structural tendency for alienation to be self-perpetuating goes some way in helping us explain its historical longevity. Furthermore, if we accept Marx’s observations about capital’s role in forging an ersatz humanity among the bourgeoisie, still more clarity emerges when we recognize that most workers in ‘developed’ political economies now surround themselves with mediating technologies—TVs, computers, cellphones, automobiles, etc.—that are routinely fetishized as being ‘freeing’


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and ‘empowering’. Arguably, such fetishes further obfuscate the individual’s recognition of his alienated condition.20

According to Zygmunt Bauman, in our increasingly digital technology-mediated culture, where the alienated are seemingly empowered through their use of ICTs, unprecedented opportunities emerge for people to seek their sense of self-worth by marketing themselves to others as if they are genuinely autonomous, valued members of their communities. In other words, the online prosumer may be motivated to take part as a way of promoting and selling himself to others as yet another commodity (Bauman, 2007). The prosumer, in this sense, may be motivated to re-capture his humanity by being included in a cultural tapestry of exchangeable commodities, even if this only involves posting a blog, attracting Facebook ‘friends,’ or being credited with a LEGO design.

Directly or indirectly, most contemporary expressions of individualism and one’s pursuit of social connection are taking place in ways that elaborate exchange value interests or capital’s general reproduction. The individual therefore can be understood to be prosuming in response to his alienation while, in so doing, deepening this very condition.21

Before concluding, it is revealing to note the nature of the ‘communities’ that most prosumers are participating in. According to Jose van Dijck, these overwhelmingly focus on celebrity culture, heavily marketed brands and other relatively apolitical or commodified activities (van Dijck, 2009: 45). Following her definition of a community as a group of people involved in a common cause or interest, surely the predominance of Internet pornography sites constitutes another pervasive hub in which tens of millions share a common interest. As George Ritzer (2007) points out, perhaps the largest segment of online porn is being created by ‘amateurs’ who produce, disseminate and consume much of their own video and photographs. What these and other such communities tell us about the priorities of the heralded prosumer is an area of research that has been (predictably) neglected by the concept’s enthusiasts.

Conclusions

Beyond product- and process-alienation, for Marx, the denial of humanity’s essence is linked primarily to our roles as tools of capital. It is in this context that I have assessed digital forms of prosumption as perpetuating this position or, prospectively, facilitating our liberation from it.


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As Toffler theorized, the prosumer’s prospective freedom is the freedom of the individual—the individual as both producer and consumer exercising his capacities in terms of what C.B. Macpherson called ‘proprietary individualism’ (Macpherson, 1962: 3).22 In his high-tech Third Wave, these property owners produce their own goods and services, exchanging them for money and other commodities. It is in this sense that, for Toffler, prosumers will come to consider one another to be equally free as the creators or co-creators of exchangeable things. Clearly, this understanding of prosumption does not transcend capitalism. Instead, it might well be the market system’s apogee.

Marx also idealized individual freedom but in a much different way. Rather than being alienated from her essence as a result of her relation to capital, in a communist (post-capitalist) society ‘the material process of production is stripped of its miserable and antagonistic form’ (Marx, 1857-58: 705-706). As exchange values are supplanted by use values, a ‘free development of individualities’ for the first time becomes possible (ibid.: 706). This is not to say that individuals realize their full potentials because they live in an un-structured political economy. Instead, the social form of individualism itself is not pre-structured; people are free to structure their society as they please, not as it has been cast by capital and its exchange value priorities.

With Marx’s view of freedom in mind, I conclude that the prosumer’s ascent serves mostly status quo interests. Of course a small number of economically privileged and reflexive individuals potentially will engage in thoughtful, creative forms of prosumption—forms mostly taking place outside the direct parameters of the production process. In this respect, aspects of prosumption are potentially subversive, enabling a minority to relate not primarily as commodities/things but, instead, as creative contributors. Surely, however, barring more general revolutionary developments, digital prosumption is destined to remain part and parcel of capital’s production and reproduction priorities with alienated prosumers labouring to satisfy their own possessive individualist needs. To repeat, this dominant form of prosumption is contradictory, particularly when a core motivation for taking part is the quest to redress one’s own alienation.

Marx recognized that variously located individuals have a degree of autonomy vis-à-vis the general conditions shaping their alienation, although predominant relations, if not overthrown, render alienation’s eradication impossible (Archibald, 2009). That being said, to repeat, a small number, no doubt, will be in the privileged position to apply prosumption to autonomously create. Many more, I anticipate, will be used through prosumption as mere tools


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of capital. Most, however, are likely to occupy a third and fundamentally contradictory position: prosumption will enable them to act as capital’s creative tools.

1 ‘Co-creation’ appears to have been developed by business interests as a means of framing prosumption as a consumer-corporate ‘partnership’ while, for academics, the term likely reflects the tendency of some postmodernists to celebrate creativity and choice through consumption (Zwick et al., 2009).

2 Toffler, thirty years earlier, made the same argument (Toffler, 1980: 11). Beyond this coming together of politically disparate interests, we also should recognize that both mainstream and progressive theorists have arrived at similar conclusions regarding the primary agent of this new order: the prosumer or co-creator herself. For mainstream observers, the perfect market system—one that produces what people want, when and where they want it—is idealized hand-in-hand with the ‘sovereign’ consumer (Gates, 2006; Tapscott and Williams, 2006). For progressives, prosumption’s/co-creation’s assumed pluralization of power and creativity enables the ‘autonomous’ worker to openly commune and realize Marx’s conceptualization of a ‘general intellect.’ As with Web 2.0 developments involving prosumption/co-creation, a growing global workforce is said to be involved in labor that develops, refines and intensifies both know-how and cooperation. For a critical analysis addressing these and related developments using concepts from both Foucault and Autonomist Marxists, see Coté and Pybus (2008). See also Lazzarato (2004). To avoid the awkwardness of gender-neutral prose, from this point onward I will use he/she, him/her, men/women interchangeably.

3 Readers familiar with G.A. Cohen’s critique of Marx concerning alienation will find much in this overview that reflects his analysis. See esp. Cohen ‘Bourgeois and Proletarians’ (1968). See also Cohen (2000).

4 Elements of this paper draw on the contents of Comor (2011).

5 The concept of alienation precedes Marx. In the Old Testament alienation is equated with idolatry. For the prophets, man is criticized for spending his energy and creativity on idols; idols that man himself has built but now worships as if they are independent of his own creation. Indeed, the very monotheistic religion that the prophets promoted has itself become a form of idolatry in that human beings now project their power to love and create unto God who they, in turn, have come to depend upon for their source of love and creativity (Fromm, 1955: 113).

6 Of course this is not to say that human beings can divorce themselves from their dependency on the earth or the limitations of their biological circumstances. From an evolutionary perspective, the early humanoids that survived successfully engaged in socially productive activities—activities that were pre-conditions of humanity’s survival given the physical deficiencies of the species in relation to other species and ecological conditions.

7 It is important to note that some capitalists do, of course, ‘produce’—especially those who are directly involved in the initial, often creative stages of their enterprise’s development. Innumerable examples of the creative-productive owner can be found in the early years of commerce involving digital technologies.

8 Söderberg adds that ‘Initially, ideological confusion is caused by capital’s experimentations to exploit the labour power and idealism of collectives…, which makes the demarcation line between friend and foe harder to draw. But for every successful ‘management’ of social cooperation to boost profits, other parts of the community will be radicalised and pitched into the conflict. Inevitably, communities will turn into hotbeds of counter-hegemonic resistance’ (Söderberg, 2002).

9 Of course the general decline of unions and the diminishing power of organized labour have facilitated these more tenuous and stressful conditions.


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10 As Braverman (1974) and others have demonstrated (Huws, 2003), this is a core component of the history of management—the history of rationalizing the production process in ways that reduce labour costs and increase the power of capitalists to substitute expensive skills with ‘scientific’ techniques and controlling technologies. There is, indeed, an ongoing political tension that stems from it; one in which capitalism’s growth constantly fosters new creative occupations while also striving to divide mental from manual labour. To repeat, worker resistance to these forces constitutes a core dynamic in the history of labour-management relations specifically and class relations more generally.

11 On the other hand, despite these complexities, there is nothing terribly new in twenty-first capitalism that Marx did not anticipate. In the nineteenth century, of course, class relations entailed more than just the bourgeoisie and proletariat; small numbers of workers escaped their proletarian positions; technologies, techniques and machines of all kinds were used by independent workers or petit bourgeois businessmen; and numerous forms of ‘non-productive’ (yet, for the production process, nevertheless essential) forms of labour existed. What has substantively changed, however, is the scale, speed and complexity of capitalism’s underlying dynamics, locally, nationally and globally.

12 Despite empirical evidence that capital historically encourages creativity but then systemizes and codifies it through technologies and management, Hardt and Negri’s recent book, Commonwealth (2009), repeats the argument that ‘social hierarchies is [sic] a fetter to productivity’ (p. 148). According to recent research conducted for the European Union, even in organizations where tacit forms of knowledge and creativity are deemed to be beneficial, the trend is ‘towards further rationalisation, standardisation and knowledge codification through the introduction of bureaucratic processes or knowledge codifying technologies’ (Ramioul and De Vroom, 2009: 85-6). The reason, others postulate (Huws and Dahlmann, 2009), is that the innovation and commodification process, under capitalism, is never ending. Corporations pursue and governments promote creative, knowledge-based developments followed by their rationalization, management and full exploitation. As knowledge advances alongside the technologies needed to commercialize it, activities once viewed to be fulfilling and even non-alienating are de-skilled, routinized or eliminated (Ibid.: 33-4).

13 Most employees today are not even permitted to enter prices into cash registers as scanners and touch screen buttons have been almost universally adopted.

14 Again, this is not to say that worker resistance has been insignificant. Critics of Braverman, among other points, emphasize that workers play an active role in this process—organizing (often successfully) in ways that have produced materially beneficial compromises (Burawoy, 1979; Edwards, 1980). However, over the long-term, such efforts have been countered through the methods discussed herein, using direct coercion (involving state mechanisms), and through cultural co-optation (including ‘standard-of-living’ improvements focusing on consumption). On the latter, see Comor (2008).

15 For a representative example—specifically on how the ‘scientific management’ of professional journalists is being elaborated using Web 2.0 technologies—see Peters (2010).

16 First, Torvalds is free to provide or deny his Institute’s technical support. Second, if others initiate profitable Linux-based services, he is free to develop similar ones (probably at lower costs). And, third, rival service providers, if they utilize an independent programmer’s (usually non-remunerated) code, are legally compelled to enter into a licensing agreement with Linux directly (Chopra and Dexter, 2005). Barring a radical reform of U.S. and international law, what is known as the Linux open source business model (Rivlin, 2003) will likely continue into the foreseeable future.

17 See also Fitzgerald (2006) and Rusovan et al. (2005).

18 Nevertheless, the prosumer’s value for vested interests pursuing all components of the production process will drive forward the ease through which prosumption will be practiced. Just as the keyboard, graphic user interface and pc are now being eclipsed by touchscreen, voice recognition and mobile computing, user-friendly prosumer interfaces will likely become increasingly systematized, making


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the kinds of creative contributions that are possible more delimited than open ended. Even the marketing aspects of prosumption will involve pre-defined, computer-mediated calculations as the labour inputs of both prosumers and marketers become increasingly automated and systematically processed.

19 More specifically, such privileged individuals have the wealth needed to circumvent the ‘unfreedom’ of the wage labour contract. They also possess the intellectual capacities needed to facilitate a reflexive understanding of ‘reality’ in the context of historical structures. Surely these individuals are relatively well positioned to engage in creative, non-alienating forms of prosumption, involving, among other pursuits, their participation in knowledge and/or artistic endeavours. Of course, because many or most of these individuals, by definition, are not working class, it is unlikely that their prosumption will focus on truly revolutionary anti-status quo activities.

20 To repeat, Archibald (2009) presents empirical evidence of the contemporary predominance of alienation. See also Erikson (1986).

21 Presumably, since capitalism and its mediating institutions remain in place, prosumer practices will not be divorced from considerations of efficiency and profitability. This is not to say that efforts to circumvent these conditions, whether pursued consciously or not, will dissipate. Instead, and in contrast to an idealistic and, indeed, voluntaristic understanding of resistance, how people respond to exploitation and alienation is contingent; it involves both the structural parameters of one’s political economic existence and, related to these, the intellectual orientations of those taking part.

22 This idealized individual is ‘the proprietor of his own person or capacities, owing nothing to society for them. The individual [is] seen neither as a moral whole, nor as part of a larger social whole, but as an owner of himself ’ (MacPherson, 1962: 3).


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Lessons from Fashions Free Culture Johanna Blakley

Johanna Blakley: I heard this amazing story about Miuccia Prada. She’s an Italian fashion designer. She goes to this vintage store in Paris with a friend of hers. She’s rooting around, she finds this one jacket by Balenciaga—she loves it. She’s turning it inside out. She’s looking at the seams. She’s looking at the construction.Her friend says, “Buy it already.” She said, “I’ll buy it, but I’m also going to replicate it.” Now, the academics in this audience may think, “Well, that sounds like plagiarism.” But to a fashionista, what it really is is a sign of Prada’s genius: that she can root through the history of fashion and pick the one jacket that doesn’t need to be changed by one iota, and to be current and to be now.

1:00 You might also be asking whether it’s possible that this is illegal for her to do this. Well, it turns out that it’s actually not illegal. In the fashion industry, there’s very little intellectual property protection. They have trademark protection, but no copyright protection and no patent protection to speak of. All they have, really, is trademark protection, and so it means that anybody could copy any garment on any person in this room and sell it as their own design. The only thing that they can’t copy is the actual trademark label within that piece of apparel. That’s one reason that you see logos splattered all over these products. It’s because it’s a lot harder for knock-off artists to knock off these designs because they can’t knock off the logo. But if you go to Santee Alley, yeah. (Laughter) Well, yeah. Canal Street, I know. And sometimes these are fun, right?

1:57 Now, the reason for this, the reason that the fashion industry doesn’t have any copyright protection is because the courts decided long ago that apparel is too utilitarian to qualify for copyright protection.They didn’t want a handful of designers owning the seminal building blocks of our clothing. And then everybody else would have to license this cuff or this sleeve because Joe Blow owns it. But too utilitarian? I mean is that the way you think of fashion? This is Vivienne Westwood. No! We think of it as maybe too silly, too unnecessary.

2:31 Now, those of you who are familiar with the logic behind copyright protection—which is that without ownership, there is no incentive to innovate—might be really surprised by both the critical success of the fashion industry and the economic success of this industry. What I’m going to argue

Lessons from Fashions Free Culture ………………………………………………………… Johanna Blakleyhttps://www.upworthy.com/the-unexpected-thing-that-fashion-does-hippies-love-and-corporations-are-totally-scared-of

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today is thatbecause there’s no copyright protection in the fashion industry, fashion designers have actually been able to elevate utilitarian design, things to cover our naked bodies, into something that we consider art.Because there’s no copyright protection in this industry, there’s a very open and creative ecology of creativity.

3:09 Unlike their creative brothers and sisters, who are sculptors or photo-graphers or filmmakers or musicians, fashion designers can sample from all their peers’ designs. They can take any element from any garment from the history of fashion and incorporate it into their own design. They’re also notorious for riffing off of the zeitgeist. And here, I suspect, they were influenced by the costumes in Avatar.Maybe just a little. Can’t copyright a costume either.

3:39 Now, fashion designers have the broadest palette imaginable in this creative industry. This wedding dress here is actually made of sporks, and this dress is actually made of aluminum. I’ve heard this dress actually sort of sounds like wind chimes as they walk through. So, one of the magical side effects of having a culture of copying, which is really what it is, is the establishment of trends. People think this is a magical thing. How does it happen? Well, it’s because it’s legal for people to copy one another.

4:10 Some people believe that there are a few people at the top of the fashion food chain who sort of dictate to us what we’re all going to wear, but if you talk to any designer at any level, including these high-end designers, they always say their main inspiration comes from the street: where people like you and me remix and match our own fashion looks. And that’s where they really get a lot of their creative inspiration, so it’s both a top-down and a bottom-up kind of industry.

4:39 Now, the fast fashion giants have probably benefited the most from the lack of copyright protection in the fashion industry. They are notorious for knocking off high-end designs and selling them at very low prices. And they’ve been faced with a lot of lawsuits, but those lawsuits are usually not won by fashion designers. The courts have said over and over again, “You don’t need any more intellectual property protection.” When you look at copies like this, you wonder: How do the luxury high-end brands remain in business? If you can get it for 200 bucks, why pay a thousand? Well, that’s one reason we had a conference here at USC a few years ago. We invited Tom Ford to come—the conference was called, “Ready to Share: Fashion and the Ownership of Creativity”—and we asked him exactly this question.Here’s what he had to say. He had just come off a successful stint as the lead designer at Gucci, in case you didn’t know.


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5:31 Tom Ford: And we found after much research that—actually not much research, quite simple research—that the counterfeit customer was not our customer.

5:39 Johanna Blakley: Imagine that. The people on Santee Alley are not the ones who shop at Gucci.(Laughter) This is a very different demographic. And, you know, a knock-off is never the same as an original high-end design, at least in terms of the materials; they’re always made of cheaper materials.But even sometimes a cheaper version can actually have some charming aspects, can breathe a little extra life into a dying trend. There’s lots of virtues of copying. One that a lot of cultural critics have pointed to is that we now have a much broader palette of design choices to choose from than we ever have before, and this is mainly because of the fast fashion industry, actually. And this is a good thing. We need lots of options.

6:27 Fashion, whether you like it or not, helps you project who you are to the world. Because of fast fashion,global trends actually get established much more quickly than they used to. And this, actually, is good news to trendsetters; they want trends to be set so that they can move product. For fashionistas, they want to stay ahead of the curve. They don’t want to be wearing what everybody else is wearing. And so, they want to move on to the next trend as soon as possible.

6:58 I tell you, there is no rest for the fashionable. Every season, these designers have to struggle to come up with the new fabulous idea that everybody’s going to love. And this, let me tell you, is very good for the bottom line. Now of course, there’s a bunch of effects that this culture of copying has on the creative process. And Stuart Weitzman is a very successful shoe designer. He has complained a lot about people copying him, but in one interview I read, he said it has really forced him to up his game.He had to come up with new ideas, new things that would be hard to copy. He came up with this Bowden-wedge heel that has to be made out of steel or titanium; if you make it from some sort of cheaper material, it’ll actually crack in two. It forced him to be a little more innovative. (Music)

7:43 And that actually reminded me of jazz great, Charlie Parker. I don’t know if you’ve heard this anecdote, but I have. He said that one of the reasons he invented bebop was that he was pretty sure that white musicians wouldn’t be able to replicate the sound. (Laughter) He wanted to make it too difficult to copy, and that’s what fashion designers are doing all the time. They’re trying to put together a signature look, an aesthetic that reflects who they are. When people knock it off, everybody knows because they’ve put that look out on the runway, and it’s a coherent aesthetic.


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8:22 I love these Gallianos. Okay, we’ll move on. (Laughter)

8:26 This is not unlike the world of comedy. I don’t know if you know that jokes also can’t be copyright protected. So when one-liners were really popular, everybody stole them from one another. But now, we have a different kind of comic. They develop a persona, a signature style, much like fashion designers. And their jokes, much like the fashion designs by a fashion designer, really only work within that aesthetic. If somebody steals a joke from Larry David, for instance, it’s not as funny.

8:57 Now, the other thing that fashion designers have done to survive in this culture of copying is they’ve learned how to copy themselves. They knock themselves off. They make deals with the fast fashion giants and they come up with a way to sell their product to a whole new demographic: the Santee Alley demographic.

9:14 Now, some fashion designers will say, “It’s only in the United States that we don’t have any respect. In other countries there is protection for our artful designs.” But if you take a look at the two other biggest markets in the world, it turns out that the protection that’s offered is really ineffectual. In Japan, for instance, which I think is the third largest market, they have a design law; it protects apparel, but the novelty standard is so high, you have to prove that your garment has never existed before, it’s totally unique. And that’s sort of like the novelty standard for a U.S. patent, which fashion designers never get— rarely get here in the states.

9:53 In the European Union, they went in the other direction. Very low novelty standard, anybody can register anything. But even though it’s the home of the fast fashion industry and you have a lot of luxury designers there, they don’t register their garments, generally, and there’s not a lot of litigation. It turns out it’s because the novelty standard is too low. A person can come in and take somebody else’s gown,cut off three inches from the bottom, go to the E.U. and register it as a new, original design. So, that does not stop the knock-off artists. If you look at the registry, actually, a lot of the registered things in the E.U. are Nike T-shirts that are almost identical to one another.

10:32 But this has not stopped Diane von Furstenberg. She is the head of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, and she has told her constituency that she is going to get copyright protection for fashion designs. The retailers have kind of quashed this notion though. I don’t think the legislation is going anywhere, because they realized it is so hard to tell the difference between


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a pirated design and something that’s just part of a global trend. Who owns a look? That is a very difficult question to answer.It takes lots of lawyers and lots of court time, and the retailers decided that would be way too expensive.

11:10 You know, it’s not just the fashion industry that doesn’t have copyright protection. There’s a bunch of other industries that don’t have copyright protection, including the food industry. You cannot copyright a recipe because it’s a set of instructions, it’s fact, and you cannot copyright the look and feel of even the most unique dish. Same with automobiles. It doesn’t matter how wacky they look or how cool they look,you cannot copyright the sculptural design. It’s a utilitarian article, that’s why. Same with furniture, it’s too utilitarian. Magic tricks, I think they’re instructions, sort of like recipes: no copyright protection.Hairdos, no copyright protection. Open source software, these guys decided they didn’t want copyright protection. They thought it’d be more innovative without it. It’s really hard to get copyright for databases.Tattoo artists, they don’t want it; it’s not cool. They share their designs. Jokes, no copyright protection.Fireworks displays, the rules of games, the smell of perfume: no. And some of these industries may seem sort of marginal to you, but these are the gross sales for low I.P. industries, industries with very little copyright protection, and there’s the gross sales of films and books. (Applause) It ain’t pretty.

12:37(Applause)

12:39 So you talk to people in the fashion industry and they’re like, “Shhh! Don’t tell anybody we can actually steal from each other’s designs. It’s embarrassing.” But you know what? It’s revolutionary, and it’s a model that a lot of other industries—like the ones we just saw with the really small bars—they might have to think about this. Because right now, those industries with a lot of copyright protection are operating in an atmosphere where it’s as if they don’t have any protection, and they don’t know what to do.

13:11 When I found out that there are a whole bunch of industries that didn’t have copyright protection, I thought, “What exactly is the underlying logic? I want a picture.” And the lawyers do not provide a picture, so I made one. These are the two main sort of binary oppositions within the logic of copyright law. It is more complex than this, but this will do. First: Is something an artistic object? Then it deserves protection. Is it a utilitarian object? Then no, it does not deserve protection. This is a difficult, unstable binary.

13:45 The other one is: Is it an idea? Is it something that needs to freely circulate in a free society? No protection. Or is it a physically fixed expression


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of an idea: something that somebody made and they deserve to own it for a while and make money from it? The problem is that digital technology has completely subverted the logic of this physically fixed, expression versus idea concept. Nowadays, we don’t really recognize a book as something that sits on our shelf or music as something that is a physical object that we can hold. It’s a digital file. It is barely tethered to any sort of physical reality in our minds. And these things, because we can copy and transmit them so easily, actually circulate within our culture a lot more like ideas than like physically instantiated objects.

14:39 Now, the conceptual issues are truly profound when you talk about creativity and ownership and, let me tell you, we don’t want to leave this just to lawyers to figure out. They’re smart. I’m with one. He’s my boyfriend, he’s okay. He’s smart, he’s smart. But you want an interdisciplinary team of people hashing this out, trying to figure out: What is the kind of ownership model, in a digital world, that’s going to lead to the most innovation? And my suggestion is that fashion might be a really good place to start looking for a model for creative industries in the future.

15:16 If you want more information about this research project, please visit our website: it’s ReadyToShare.org. And I really want to thank Veronica Jauriqui for making this very fashionable presentation.

15:27 Thank you so much. (Applause)

There may be small errors in this transcript.


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Know Your Product Rob Horning

It’s common to critique social media by pointing out that users believe they are consumers but are in fact are the product, a packaged and labelled audience being sold to marketers, the real “users” of ad-supported social media. Or worse, users are both the product and the labor making the product, all for the benefit of the social-media companies that own it. This means we are not merely deluded but also exploited when we think of ourselves as “consuming” social media.

The assumption in this critique is that we don’t want to be a product and instead want the agency and autonomous expression that social media seem to promise. From that point of view, users sign up on Facebook with the goal of expressing themselves and hearing what their friends have to say, but are eventually warped into becoming a kind of reified personal brand through exposure to the product’s toxic affordances of self-quantification. Naive users think they are signing up for a personalized public sphere and then, undeterred by the evident oxymoron, find themselves in a hall of mirrors in which all they can see—and all they end up wanting to see—is themselves.

I’ve made that argument in the past, but it seems to presume a sort of haplessness in social media users, who don’t know well enough to stop using services that are exploiting and stupidifying them. It doesn’t seem adequate to explaining the pleasure users derive from social media, even as they become reifying and exploitive. I don’t think users’ continued use is strictly a matter of network effects and sunk costs, or even a matter of a cost-benefit analysis permitted them to make a rational decision that surrendering their personal data constitutes a fair exchange for the services social media offer. Instead, I want to consider the possibility that users enjoy becoming the product.

The services that social media supply (holding a “graph” of one’s social connections; amassing and archiving personal data; making the promise of an on-demand audience for oneself plausible; permitting a variety of pre-formatted modes of self-expression; offering algorithmically constituted recommendations of what you should read, who you should know, how you should spend your time; and so on) help constitute the self as something a user can consume. We get to be a commodity and consume it at the same time. We are like the hot dog putting ketchup on itself.

Know Your Product ……………………………………………………………………………… Rob Horninghttp://thenewinquiry.com/blogs/marginal-utility/know-your-product/

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This self-commodification does not diminish the user’s self-conception but rather makes the self conceivable, legible. The self as product is inherently not guilty of some of the deauthenticating aspects of agency which threaten the integrity of other versions of the self: being calculating, unspontaneous, manipulative, phony, etc. The self as product can be seen as something that simply is, a given thing articulated in a definite form. It enters the realm of the socially conspicuous.

Only as a product can we recognize ourselves as “genuinely” real, given the amount of attention and effort collectively directed at enchanting and foregrounding products within a consumer-capitalist culture. We are ideologically trained, repeatedly, every day, to love consumer goods; naturally we would want to become a consumer good ourselves, to appear deserving of love—from ourselves as well as from other people (who, on social media, offer quantifiable tokens of that deserved love in the likes and so on).

Products in consumer-capitalist culture quickly lose their lovability, however, as they lose their novelty. They become moribund. They become trash. Consumerism relies on disposability and the perpetual renewal of consumer desire, of discontented people constantly demanding more for themselves. This allows for the limitless expansion of demand in the economy. Consumer ideology fuses self-growth, also conceived as potentially limitless, to the ability to want more things. This converts an economic imperative into a moral one: I must embrace my limitless potential and find ways to express it, or else fail as a human being.

Growth itself, as a personal goal, is adapted from the capitalist necessity of pursuing limitless accumulation in an economic environment of growth or death. Personal growth is a matter of continual dissatisfaction, of refusing to be content, even as we make ourselves into content. Anything that I start to think I know about myself seems not merely familiar but fake. What is real about me is what I discover about myself (usually in the form of fresh desire), not what I already know, which I have consumed already.

So the self, as a product, loses its enchantment for us and needs to be revitalized to the extent that it becomes familiar, known, understood. We love ourselves only as a novelty, a mystery, not as a staple product. We want to be able to apprehend ourselves as a new, desirable thing that we can consume and enjoy. This makes us feel relevant, marketable. We can imagine someone buying into the idea of us, and that helps us buy into ourselves. But inevitably our desire for ourselves needs to be renewed, and we will need to be repackaged.


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It seems untenable to feel authentic only when you’re surprising yourself. Social media try to make this contradiction seem to cohere. They offer ways in which to always consume ourselves anew as new. Algorithmic recommendations in particular cater to this hope of seeing a stranger in the personal data we’ve generated, an alien person we can claim as a real self. They can enlarge our ability to desire (making us grow) while seeming to draw on true information about us that we have somehow provided. Everything you have consumed and expelled online gets purifed and re-presented as new desires, a new you.

By processing our personal data into things like Facebook’s Newsfeed, algorithms can present us with a carefully repackaged self. We then get the thrill of unboxing ourselves as if we were a coveted new product and seeing what surprise awaits within. That this box we are continually rewrapped in is also a cage can be more readily excused. In that cage, we will only see what reinforces the central importance of novelty, but it won’t matter as long as we feel new ourselves.


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About Open Source Ecology

The mission of Open Source Ecology (OSE) is to create the open source economy.

An open source, libre economy is an efficient economy which increases innovation by open collaboration. To get there, OSE is currently developing a set of open source blueprints for the Global Village Construction Set (GVCS)—a set of the 50 most important machines that it takes for modern life to exist—everything from a tractor, to an oven, to a circuit maker. In the process of creating the GVCS, OSE intends to develop a modular, scalable platform for documenting and developing open source, libre hardware—including blueprints for both physical artifacts and for related open enterprises.

The current practical implementation of the GVCS is a life size LEGO set of powerful, self-replicating production tools for distributed production. The Set includes fabrication and automated machines that make other machines. Through the GVCS, OSE intends to build not individual machines— but machine construction systems that can be used to build any machine whatsoever. Because new machines can be built from existing machines, the GVCS is intended to be a kernel for building infrastructures of modern civilization.

Vision

We—the countless collaborators upon whose shoulders this Vision stands—imagine a world of innovation accelerated by open, collaborative development—to solve wicked problems—before they are created. We see a world of prosperity that doesn’t leave anyone behind. We see a world of interdisciplinary, synergistic systems thinking—not the isolated silos of today’s world.

This work of distributing raw productive power to people is not only a means to solving wicked problems—but a means for humans themselves to evolve. The creation of a new world depends on expansion of human consciousness and personal evolution—as individuals tap their autonomy, mastery, and purpose—bo Build Themselves—and to become responsible for the world around them. One outcome is a world beyond artificial material scarcity—where no longer do material constraints and resource conflicts dictate most of

About …………………………………………………………………………………… Open Source Ecologyhttp://opensourceecology.org/about-overview/

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human interactions—personal and political. We see a future world where we can say—“Resource conflicts? That was back in the stone age.”

Your project is amazing. Thrilling, actually… It’s people like you who really give me hope for the future.—Chris Anderson, TED Curator

Interesting ideas. I don’t know of anything quite like it.—Noam Chomsky

Values Statement

Our core values revolve around open collaboration—which implies the vulnerability to share work in progress, without ego, power struggle, and insecurity. Our core values are efficiency, and the ethics and wisdom to understand what we should be efficient about. In practice, we strive to find effective ways to document our work—to create an open collaboration platform—where we can bring collaborators on boards rapidly. While it is difficult to document—the realtime, cloud collaborative tools of the information age make this easier—and we aim to tap these new tools to document and develop together.

The end point of our practical development is Distributive Enterprise—an open, collaborative enterprise that publishes all of its strategic, business, organizational, enterprise information—so that others could learn and thereby truly accelerate innovation by annihilating all forms of competitive waste. We see this as the only way to solve wicked problems faster than they are created—a struggle worth the effort. In the age where companies spend more on patent protectionism than on research and development—we feel that unleashing the power of collaborative innovation is an idea whose time has come.

The Beginning

When OSE was first founded in 2003, the concept of Open Source Ecology was born. This means a world where open source meets economy meets ecology. This means a prosperous world of people living in harmony with their natural life support systems. The is the initial writing from the OSE Legacy Site:

I. What is Open Source? Open Source refers to the model of providing goods and services which includes the possibility of


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the end-user’s participation in the production of these goods and services. This concept has already been demonstrated in Linux, the open source computing system. With Linux, a large number of software developers have contributed to creating a viable alternative to the proprietary Windows computer operating system. Many people can readily see the advantages- all Linux software is free. Please read these articles on the concept of Open Source software and its implications for changing business.

II. What is Open Source Economics? Our mission is to extend the Open Source model to the provision any goods and services- Open Source Economics. This means opening access to the information and technology which enables a different economic system to be realized, one based on the integration of natural ecology, social ecology, and industrial ecology. This economic system is based on open access- based on widely accessible information and associated access to productive capital- distributed into the hands of an increased number of people. Read about an inspiring example of such an economic model being currently put into practice with respect to manufacturing vehicles.

We believe that a highly distributed, increasingly participatory model of production is the core of a democratic society, where stability is established naturally by the balance of human activity with sustainable extraction of natural resources. This is the opposite of the current mainstream of centralized economies, which have a structurally built-in tendency towards of overproduction.

III. What is Open Source Ecology? We derive our organization’s name from a concept which refers to the integration of the natural, societal, and industrial ecologies- Open Source Ecology- aiming at sustainable and regenerative economics. We are convinced that a possibility of a quality life exists, where human needs are guaranteed to the world’s entire population- as long as we ask ourselves basic questions on what societal structures and productive activities are truly appropriate to meeting human needs for all. At the end of the day, the goal is to liberate our time to engage in exactly that which each of us wants to be doing- instead of what we need to do to survive. All have the potential to thrive. Today, an increasingly smaller percentage of the world’s population is in this position.


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Since 2003, we have gained much more clarity on our mission. We have been transitioning steadily from vision to execution—via the GVCS and the radically efficient, distributed production methods that lead to 1-day production times of heavy machines. This is a metric of efficiency that underlies our work—and indicates that the economic power of distributed production is real—and that open development is the next industrial revolution. We believe that the open source economy is an idea whose time has come.


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Andrea Büttner (1972)

Images in Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment (detail)

2014Offset print (Courtesy Hollybush Gardens, London and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles. Copyright Andrea Büttner/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2015.)

Andrea Büttner’s work Images in Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment is a series of large offset prints that display a vast array of pictures—both historical and contemporary—in an illustrated guide of sorts to specific passages from Immanuel Kant’s third Critique. The images are meant to form the practical part of Kant’s theories and give shape to his critique which aims at linking ‘into a totality’, ‘two aspects of philosophy’, namely, theory and practice. In her series of posters, Büttner considers the ways in which specific images correspond to Kant’s abstract text: the images he may have had in mind while writing, and those that are envisaged while reading. Through this plethora of images she makes it possible to perceive Kant’s concepts through our senses.

Kujutised Kanti „Otsustusvõime kriitikas” (detail)

2014 Ofsetleht (Hollybush Gardens (London) ja David Kordansky galerii (Los Angeles) loal. Autoriõigused Andrea Büttner/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2015.)

Andrea Büttneri teos „Kujutised Kanti „Otsustus-võime kriitikas”” on seeria suureformaadilisi ofsetlehti, millel kujutatud rohked pildid – nii ajaloolised kui ka nüüdisaegsed – selgitavad Immanuel Kanti kolmanda kriitika mõningaid lõike. Kujutised moodustavad Kanti teooriate praktilise poole ja joonistavad välja kriitika põhijooned, mille eesmärgiks on ühendada terviklikkuseks „filosoofia kaks tahku” – teooria ja praktika. Oma postriseerias vaatleb Büttner, kuidas konkreetsed pildid vastavad Kanti abstraktsele tekstile: Kantil kirjutamise ajal silme ees olla võinud pildid ja need, mis on kavan-datud ta teksti lugedes. Loodud kujutiste ülekülluse abil muudab kunstnik võimalikuks Kanti mõttekäike oma meeltega tajuda.

Amy Cuddy (1972)

Your Body Language Shapes Who You Are (still)

2012Video, 21 minutes(Courtesy TED)

Amy Cuddy’s research on body language reveals that we can change other people’s perceptions—and even our own body chemistry—simply by changing body positions. Her rousing presentation in 2012 at TED Global on what she calls ‘power poses’ is among the most viewed TED Talks of all time. In one YouTube post alone it has been viewed over six and a half million times. In its wake, Cuddy has attracted lucrative speaking invitations from around the world, a contract from Little, Brown & Co. for a book to be published next year, and an eclectic army of posture-conscious followers. Elementary school students, retirees, elite athletes, surgeons, politicians, victims of bullying and sexual assault, beleaguered refugees, people dealing with mental illness or physical limitations (including a quadriplegic): they have all written to say that adopting a confident pose—or simply visualizing one, as in that last case—delivers almost instant self-assurance. As Cuddy said, ‘Let your body tell you you’re powerful and deserving, and you become more present, enthusiastic and authentically yourself.’1

1 www.nytimes.com/2014/09/21/fashion/amy-cuddy-takes-a-stand-TED-talk.html?_r=0

Amy Cuddy (1972)Sinu kehakeel kujundab sinu olemuse (stoppkaader)

2012 Video, 21 minutit (TED loal)

Amy Cuddy kehakeele uurimus paljastab, et teiste inimestele jäetavat muljet ja isegi meie kehakeemiat on võimalik muuta kõigest kehaasendit vahetades. Cuddy innustav ettekanne nn „jõupooside” kohta 2012. aasta TED Globalil on üks kõige vaadatumaid TEDi loenguid läbi aegade. Juba ainuüksi ühte YouTube’i postitust on vaadatud rohkem kui kuus ja pool miljonit korda. Hiljem on Cuddy saanud mitmeid ahvatlevaid pakkumisi üle maailma, sõlminud lepingu kirjastusega Little, Brown & Co raamatu avaldamiseks järgmisel aastal ja saanud endale poosi-teadlike jüngrite eklektilise armee. Põhikooli õpilased, pensionärid, tippsportlased, kirurgid, poliitikud, kiusamise ja seksuaalse vägivalla ohvrid, vaevatud põgenikud, vaimuhaiguse ja füüsiliste puude (sh halvatuse) all kannatavad inimesed: kõik on kirjutanud, et enesekindla poosi võtmine – või halvatud inimese puhul selle ette-kujutamine – tekitab peaaegu kohest enesega rahulolu. „Lase kehal endale öelda, et oled tugev ja vääriline, ning sa muutud rohkem kohalolevaks, teotahteliseks ja ehtsalt iseendaks.”1

Hank Herron (1970)

Study for Getty Tomb

1973/2015Digital image(Courtesy Carol Duncan)

The little-known Hank Herron made his gallery debut in 1971 at one of those stylish and expensive galleries that could count on critical attention from the high art press. He was a forerunner to the movement that would later come to be known as appropriation art. Together with the work of his forbearer Elaine Sturtevant, Herron‘s practice expressed his fundamental belief that even in the early ’70s ‘the concept of authorship has become, in any case, difficult to sustain’.2

Where Sturtevant’s ‘repetitions’ were carefully inexact copies based on works by her male contemporaries, Herron strove to produce precise replicas, perfect copies, and of just one artist, fellow New Englander Frank Stella. In considering his works, one begins to become profoundly conscious of and receptive to a radically new and philosophical element that is precluded from its referent, the work of Mr. Stella, i.e., the denial of originality both in its most blatant manifestation (the fake as such) and in its subtle insouciant undertones of static objectivity (the telescoping of time). Herron’s art is surface, it is narrow and most especially, tragic, for one is forcefully reminded at every line and turn that it represents the ontological predicament of our time, indeed of every living being: inauthentic experience. They are not forgeries but novel works—in a word, fakes.

Hank Herron (1970)Getty Hauakambri eskiis

1973/2015 Digitaalne kujutis (Carol Duncani loal)

Vähetuntud Hank Herron tegi oma galeriidebüüdi 1971. aastal ühes neist stiilsetest ja kallitest galeriidest, kus võis kindel olla oluliste kunsti-kriitikute tähelepanule. Ta oli teerajaja liikumises, mida kümne aasta pärast tunti apropriatsioonikunsti nime all. Nagu ta eelkäija Elaine Sturtevanti looming, väljendas ka Herroni kunst sügavat veendumust, et juba 1970. aastate alguses on “autorluse mõiste muutunud kaduvaks nähtuseks”.2

Kui Sturtevanti „kordused” olid hoolikalt ebatäpsed koopiad tema kaasaegsete meeskunstnike loomingust, siis Herroni sihiks oli luua täpseid ja täiuslikke koopiaid ainult ühe kunstniku, samuti New Englandist pärit Frank Stella töödest. Herroni töid lähemalt vaadates muutub äärmiselt tajutavaks radikaalselt uus ja filosoofiline element, mida ei ole referendil ehk Frank Stella teostel. Selleks on originaalsuse eitamine nii kõige ilmsemal moel (võltsing kui selline) kui ka staatilise objektiivsuse muretu alatooni kaudu (aja kontsentreeritus). Herroni looming on pinnaline, see on kitsas ja eelkõige traagiline, sest iga joon ja iga vorm meenutab, et esitab meie aja iga elusolendi onto-loogilist kimbatust: mitteehtsat kogemust. Tegu ei ole võltsingu, vaid uute järeletehtud töödega.

2 Duncan, Carol, The Aesthetics of Power: essays in critical art history. P. 211

Luka Knezevic-Strika (1983)

William Eggleston—Chromes (Volume 2) (still)

2012HD video, 11 mins(Courtesy the artist)

In Luka Knezevic-Strika’s three videos, we watch as a lithe hand delicately sifts through every page of each volume of William Eggleston: Chromes, a trilogy of books that reproduces a selection from more than 5,000 Kodachrome and Ektachrome slides that were drawn from ten chronologically-ordered binders found in a safe in the Eggleston Artistic Trust. Knezevic-Strika’s videos replicate the pouring over of images which went into the production of these books, and the attempt to reproduce an image as closely to the original as the chosen medium allows for. Where the book excels in resolution, the video excels in distribution. Knezevic-Strika’s aim, though, was not to create an artwork; rather it was simply to utilize HD video’s relative transparency to share his delight at the work of another photographer as it is rendered in a set of expensive, difficult-to-obtain publications. In his words ‘The books are a pleasure to look at and if you don’t have a bookstore where you could check out the books, you can get a glimpse here. I’ve never held, let alone owned a book this beatifully crafted. I’m glad I could convey part of the greatness this way.’3

Luka Knezevic-Strika (1983)William Eggleston – Chromes (Köide 2) (stoppkaader)

2012 HD video, 11 minutit (Kunstniku loal)

Luka Knezevic-Strika kolmes videos on näha, kuidas nõtke käsi lappab õrnalt läbi William Egglestoni „Chromes“ raamatute kõik lehed. Tegemist on raamatutriloogiaga, kus on reprodutseeritud valik rohkem kui 5000-st Kodachrome’i ja Ektachrome’i slaidist, mis pärinevad Eggleston Artistic Trusti seifist leitud kümnest kronoloogiliselt järjestatud kaustast. Knezevic-Strika videod imiteerivad kujutiste tulvaga töötamist nende raamatute valmistamisel ja soovi taasluua kujutisi nii originaalitruult kui valitud meedium seda lubab. Kui raamatu tugevuseks on piltide kvaliteet, siis videol levitatavus. Kuid Knezevic-Strika eesmärk ei olnud luua kunstiteost, vaid kasutada HD-video suhtelist läbipaistvust, et jagada oma heameelt teise fotograafi loomingu pärast, mida vahendab kallihinnaline ja raskesti kättesaadav trükis. Ta leiab; „Raamatuid on mõnus vaadata. Kui sul ei ole lähedal poodi, kus raamatuid sirvida, siis on seda võimalik teha siin. Ma ei ole kunagi varem hoidnud käes, veel vähem omanud, raamatut, mis oleks nii kaunilt tehtud. Mul on hea meel, et suutsin osa selle suursugususest edasi anda.”3

3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zt7HhRMUUxY

Gil Leung (1980)

Vessels & Tools_wrapper

2015Printed text30×21 cm(Courtesy the artist)

Gil Leung‘s newly commissioned work Vessels and Tools brings together a number of elements; a constellation of pieces, each of which questions itself as much as its neighbour. Through its various elements, the work shifts between modes, all of which appear to be about presentation, about how a thing appears. An empty light box advertises nothing but itself. The soundtrack, whose central motif is the recording of a church organ being tuned, could be understood to be about the effort to present as best one can. And lastly, there is a short story, the heart of which is about the construction of images; of people, places and even situations.

But, as is characteristic of Leung’s practice, the work does not reside in any discreet element; rather it is in our experience of the relationships between them all as they overlap, support, and hamper each other. So the light box lights the room, enough to read the text. And the music plays, or promises to, and tries to seduce us into staying, but then perhaps makes it hard to concentrate enough to read. Or not, in which case we absorb ourselves in the text and relegate the soundtrack to mere background noise, just as we have, so quickly, come to ignore the device which supplies the lighting, thinking only about what it provides for us. Of course we don’t have to read, we can just sit and listen to the music, promising ourselves we’ll read the text later, and perhaps we do. So it is precisely here, in these little slips and feints, these openings and embraces, these debts and promises that the oscillating beauty of the work resides.

Gil Leung (b.1980)Anumad ja tööriistad_paber

2015 Trükitud tekst 30×21 cm (Kunstniku loal)

Gil Leungi vastvalminud töö „Anumad ja töö-riistad” koondab endas mitmeid elemente – see on süsteemne paigutus asjadest, millest igaüks seab ennast sama palju kahtluse alla kui oma kõrvalseisjat. Erinevate elementide kaudu muutub teose vorm, kuid ikka on teemaks esitlemine ja näivus. Tühi valguskast reklaamib ainult iseennast. Heliriba, mille keskne motiiv on kirikuoreli häälestamine, võib tõlgendada katsena esitleda ennast võimalikult heast küljest. Ja lõpuks on lühijutt, mille tuumaks on kujutiste konstrueerimine inimestest, kohtadest ja isegi olukordadest.

Kuid nagu Leungi loomingule omane, ei seisne teose tähendus üheski üksikus elemendis, vaid pigem selles, kuidas me tajume nende omavahelisi suhteid, kuidas nad üksteisega kattuvad, üksteist toetavad või takistavad. Valguskast valgustab tuba, et oleks võimalik teksti lugeda. Muusika mängib ja meelitab meid jääma, kuid võib-olla ei lase seejuures lugemisele keskenduda. Kui siiski seda suudame, siis süveneme teksti ja taandame muusika kõigest taustaheliks, samamoodi nagu me harjusime ära seadmega, mis valgustab, ja mõtleme ainult sellest, mis ta meile võimalikuks on teinud. Me ei pea loomulikult lugema, võime ka istuda ja muusikat kuulata ning lubada endale, et loeme teksti hiljem. Võib-olla loemegi. Just neis väikestes nihetes ja põigetes, avanemistes ja haaretes, võlgades ja lubadustes peitubki teose võnklev ilu.

Cayce Pollard (1971/2003)

The cult of the school of anti

2015Screen grab of Google search(Courtesy William Gibson and Buzz Rickson’s)

Cayce Pollard is a freelance marketing consultant, a coolhunter with an unusual intuitive sensitivity for branding. As a consequence of her ‘morbid and sometimes violent reactivity to the semiotics of the marketplace’4, Cayce dresses in plain clothing she has either bought or rendered unadorned with brand markings of any kind. These are referred to as ‘Cayce Pollard Units’ or CPUs. CPUs are either black, white, or gray, and ideally seem to have come into this world without human intervention.

‘What people take for relentless minimalism is a side effect of too much exposure to the reactor-cores of fashion. This has resulted in a remorseless paring-down of what she can and will wear. She is, literally, allergic to fashion. She can only tolerate things that could have been worn, to a general lack of comment, during any year between 1945 and 2000. She’s a design-free zone, a one-woman school of anti whose very austerity periodically threatens to spawn its own cult.’5

Ulrike K. Heiser sees Pollard as a part of the tradition of the technomadic people ‘with rootedness in the virtual rather than the real’6 who ‘find their true homes in the non-spatial reaches of digital networks’7 whilst critic Jeremy Pugh proffers that ‘the precocious Pollard personifies and humanizes the uncertain anxiety, optimistic hope, and downright fear many feel when looking to the future.’8

Cayce Pollard (1971)Anti-koolkonna kultus

2015 Google´i otsingu ekraanitõmmis (William Gibsoni ja Buzz Rickson´si loal)

Cayce Pollard on vabakutseline turunduskonsultant, ebaharilikult vaistliku brändimisoskusega trendi-skaut. „Sünge ja vahel vägivaldse vastusena turusemiootikale”4 riietub Cayce lihtsalt ning on oma rõivastelt eemaldatud igasugused brändimärgid. Ta viitab neile kui „Cayce Pollardi üksustele” ehk CPÜdele. CPÜd on kas mustad, valged või hallid ning näevad ideaaljuhul välja nagu oleksid siia maailma tulnud ilma inimese kaasabita.

„See, mida inimesed peavad kompromissituks minimalismiks, on moe tuumareaktoriga liiga kaua kokkupuutumise tagajärg. Tulemuseks on kandmiseks sobivate asjade halastamatu piiramine. Ta on moele otseses mõttes allergiline. Pollard suudab taluda ainult asju, mida oleks vabalt sobinud kanda ajavahemikus 1945–2000. Ta on disainivaba tsoon, ühe-naise-vastandumiskool, kelle range lihtsus põhjustab järjepidevalt kultuslikku järgimist.”5

Ulrike K. Heiser leiab, et Pollard on osa tehno-maadilise inimese traditsioonist, kelle „juured on pigem virtuaalsuses kui reaalsuses”6 ja kelle „tõeline kodu on digitaalse võrgu mitteruumilises avaruses”7 , samas kui kriitik Jeremy Pugh pakub, et „varaküps Pollard kehastab ja annab näo teatud ärevusele, optimistlikule lootusele ja otsesele hirmule, mida paljud tulevikku vaadates tunnevad”.8

4; 5 Gibson, William (2003). Pattern Recognition. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons. 6; 7 Heiser, Ulrike K. (2008). Zilcosky, John, ed. Virtual Travellers: Cyberspace and Virtual Networks. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.8 Rapatzikou, Tatiana (2004). Gothic Motifs in the Fiction of William Gibson. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

James Richards (1983)

Radio at Night (still) 2015Video, 8 mins(Courtesy Cabinet Gallery, London, and Rodeo Gallery, Istanbul)

James Richards’ video Radio at Night was produced as an online commission for the Walker Art Center in the spring of 2015. The work was to be made in response to an artist in the Walker’s collection; Richards chose the British filmmaker Derek Jarman, with whom he shares a love of collage techniques, painterly sensuousness, and inverted color palettes. In this eight-minute video, images flow together, each as unhitched from its original context as the next, now held together by a logic deeply felt but difficult to articulate; some ineffable combination of gesture, texture, and mood.

This strangely-channeled material is overlayed with Richards’ most meditative and coherent soundtrack to date. The unconsciously recognisable sounds of digital technologies as they slightly misfire—a small camera and its microphone scraping along the surface of a table, the noise of a hard drive ‘thinking’, a hard wind rushing into an unshielded microphone—are combined with voices of a female choir performing excerpts from ‘The enemies of She Who call her various names’, a 1972 poem by American feminist, lesbian activist, and poet Judy Grahn. In a reference to a text by Richards’ late friend, the artist Ian White (1971–2013), the title Radio at Night captures the atmosphere of a work, which, though constructed through the public, the technological, and the impersonal, manages to sustain an intense sensation of intimacy.

James Richards (1983)Öine raadio (stoppkaader)

2015 Video, 8 minutit (Cabinet galerii (London) ja Rodeo galerii (Istanbul) loal)

James Richardsi veebivideo „Öine raadio” valmis Walkeri muuseumi tellimusel 2015. aasta kevadel. Teos pidi olema vastus ühele kunstnikule Walkeri kogudest. Richards valis välja inglise filmitegija Derek Jarmani, kellega neil on ühine huvi kollaaži, maalilise tundlikkuse ja pööratud värvigamma vastu. Selles kaheksaminutilises videos jooksevad kokku kujutised, mis on kõik oma algsest kontekstist lahutatud. Neid hoiab koos sügavalt tunnetatud loogika, mida on keeruline sõnastada – tabamatu žestide, tekstuuride ja meeleolu seos.

Seda veidralt edastatud materjali saadab Richardsi seni kõige meditatiivsem ja terviklikum tausta-muusika. Alateadlikult äratuntavad digitaalse tehnoloogia helid, mis veidi mööda kõlavad, väike kaamera ja selle mikrofon, mida mööda lauapinda veetakse, „mõtleva” kõvaketta hääl, kõva tuul, mis katmata mikrofoni sööstab, on segatud naiskooriga, mis esitab lõike Ameerika feministi, lesbiaktivisti ja luuletaja Judy Grahni 1972. aasta luuletusest „The enemies of She Who call her various names” („Tema vaenlased, kes kutsuvad teda erinevate nimedega”). Viitena Richardsi lahkunud sõbra, kunstniku Ian White’i (1971–2013) tekstile tabab teose pealkiri „Öine raadio” hästi teose meeleolu, mis on loodud küll avaliku, tehnoloogilise ja ebaisikliku abil, kuid suudab väga intiimset õhustikku tekitada.

Rockstar Games (formed/moodustatud 1998) & Karl Smith (1976)

Orca

2015Diasec mounted inkjet print60×60 cm(Courtesy the artist and Rockstar Games)

Rockstar Games was founded in 1998 in New York City by the British video game producers Sam Houser, Dan Houser, Terry Donovan, Jamie King, and Gary Foreman. They are known primarily for the seminal works Grand Theft Auto, Max Payne, Red Dead, and L.A. Noire, as well as the use of open world, free roaming settings in their games.

Karl Smith was walking through a homeless community underneath the light rail tracks in a place called Strawberry when he spotted something. Lit in silhouette by the dying light, just barely visible, a man sat alone against a wall with a bottle in his hand. Smith pulled out his camera and, in his words, ‘caught this gentleman having a quiet drink’. It’s a snapshot of life on the edge, but it’s not real—all of it happened in a video game. Smith was playing Grand Theft Auto V, and the photo he snapped was taken with his character’s smartphone. GTA V is unusual among games in that it presents its players with all of the limitations of real photography, transplanted onto the virtual space. You can’t take a photo of something unless your character can see it, and you can only shoot from positions and angles that he or she can reach. You’re restricted by the capabilities of your run-of-the-mill virtual smartphone, which comes equipped with basic zooming and Instagram-like filters, and by the physical abilities of your avatar. Rockstar Games has given gamers the virtual tools to interpret their digital environment, though all of the gamers’ images are classified as in-game ‘screenshots’ and remain under the copyright of Rockstar Games. Smith, though, poses the question, ‘If you capture virtual light in a virtual world with a virtual camera, is that photography?’9

Rockstar Games (founded/asutatud 1998) & Karl Smith Mõõkvaal

2015Pigmentfoto diasecil 60×60 cm(kunstniku ja Rockstar Games loal)

Rockstar Gamesi asutasid 1998. aastal New Yorgis inglise videomänguprodutsendid Sam Houser, Dan Houser, Terry Donovan, Jamie King ja Gary Foreman, keda tuntakse peamiselt seoses legendaarsete mängude Grand Theft Auto, Max Payne’i, Red Deadi ja L.A. Noire’iga ning avatud maailma ja vaba rändluse kasutamise tõttu oma mängudes.

Karl Smith kõndis kohas nimega Strawberry parajasti läbi kõrgraudtee all asuva kodutute kogukonna, kui ta märkas midagi. Hääbuva valguse käes oli näha mehe siluetti, kes istus, pudel käes, seina vastu toetudes. Smith võttis välja oma fotoaparaadi ja tegi pildi „härrasmehest vaikselt napsu võtmas”. See on foto elust ühiskonna äärealadel, kuid see ei ole reaalne. Kõik juhtus videomängus. Smith mängis Grand Theft Auto V-d ja foto tegi ta oma tegelase nutitelefoniga. GTA V on ebaharilik mäng, sest mängijatele kehtivad seal kõik pärismaailmas pildistamise piirangud, kuigi virtuaalsesse ruumi ümbertõstetuna. Pildistada on võimalik ainult asju, mida tegelane näeb, ning ainult neist kohtadest ja rakurssidelt, mis on talle kättesaadavad. Sind piiravad tavapärase virtuaalse nutitelefoni funktsioonid, millega saab suurendada ja Instagrami-laadseid filtreid lisada, ning sinu avatari füüsilised võimed. Rockstar Games on andnud mängijatele virtuaalsed tööriistad oma digikeskkonna tõlgendamiseks, kuid kõik mängijate tehtud pildid jäävad endiselt mängusisesteks kuvatõmmisteks ja seega kehtib neile Rockstar Gamesi autoriõigus. Smith esitab justkui küsimuse: „Kas virtuaalses maailmas virtuaalse kaameraga virtuaalset valgust püüdes on tegu endiselt fotograafiaga?”9

9 http://www.hopesandfears.com/hopes/culture/video-games/213967-video-game-photography

The Mark Rothko Art Center/ Mark Rothko kunstikeskus (founded/asutatud 2007)

Untitled (Red, Orange)

1968/2007Reproduction on canvas172×130 cm(Courtesy Daugavpils Mark Rothko Art Centre)

Mark Rothko was born Marcus Yakovlevich Rothkowitz in Dvinsk, Vitebsk Governorate, in the Russian Empire, which is now the town of Daugavpils in Latvia. The Rothko Art Centre in Latvia is the first permanent Mark Rothko installation in Eastern Europe. Housed in the Daugavpils Fortress, this project celebrates the art of Rothko in his hometown. A unique collection of 41 museum-quality reproductions of Rothko’s works from different periods was created in close cooperation with the artist’s son Christopher Rothko. These reproductions sit alongside six original works donated by the Rothko estate. For Prosu(u)mer, the Rothko Centre has generously loaned EKKM a reproduction of an iconic Rothko currently in the collection of Fondation Beyeler in Basel, who describe the painting thus:

‘An area of deep red, roughly in the shape of a square, and of warm orange red in the form of a crossbar hover over a red ground. The two elements darken like shadows towards their edges, where the colour also appears to become denser and to fray, almost as if they were billowing out in an exhalation of breath, only then, in the next instant, to recede back into the picture plane—securely attached yet impossible to pin down. The painting’s ground is powdery, allowing the beige of the underlying canvas to shine through and charging the peripheries with additional pictorial vitality. Acting almost as a sum of his entire artistic experience, Untitled (Red, Orange) is perhaps best suited to describe Rothko’s “classical” approach to pictorial composition, which he had evolved progressively since the late 1940s.’10

Collection of the Mark Rothko Art Centre/ Mark Rothko kunstikeskuse kollektsioon(Founded/asutatud 2007)Nimetu (punane, oranž)

1968/2007 Reproduktsioon lõuendil 172×130 cm(Daugavpils Mark Rothko kunstikeskuse loal)

Mark Rothko sündis Venemaa Keisririigi Vitebski kubermangus Dvinski linnas, tänapäeval Daugavpils Lätis, Marcus Yakovlevich Rothkowitzi nimel all. Mark Rothko kunstikeskus Lätis on esimene Mark Rothkole pühendatud kompleks Ida-Euroopas. Daugavpilsi linnuses asuv muuseum näitab Rothko loomingut kunstniku kodulinnas. Ainulaadne kogu, mis koosneb Rothko erinevatest perioodidest pärit teoste 41-st kõrgekvaliteetsest koopiast, pandi kokku tihedas koostöös kunstniku poja Christopher Rothkoga. Koopiate kõrval on kuus originaalteost, mille annetasid Rothko pärijad. „Prosu(u)meri” raames on Rothko kunstikeskus vastutulelikult laenanud EKKMile ikoonilise Rothko maali koopia, mis hetkel kuulub Baselis asuva Fondation Beyeleri kogusse, kus antud maali kirjeldatakse nii:

Umbes ruudukujuline sügavpunane pind ja sooja oranži värvi ristjoon punase tausta kohal hõljumas. Mõlemad elemendid tumenevad äärtest nagu varjud ning värv näib seal intensiivsem ja muutub hõredaks, justkui oleks hingeõhuna välja pahvatatud ainult selleks, et järgmisel hetkel pildipinnale tagasi tõmbuda – kindlalt ankrus, aga võimatu paigal hoida. Maali pulbritaoline krunt lubab lõuendi beežil toonil läbi kumada, muutes maali servad pildiliselt veelgi elavamaks. Peaaegu kogu Rothko kunstikogemust kokkuvõttev „Nimeta (punane, oranž)” sobib ehk kõige paremini kirjeldama Rothko „klassikalist” lähenemist kompositsioonile, mida ta alates 1940. aastate lõpust järjepidevalt arendas.10

10 http://www.fondationbeyeler.ch/en/collection/mark-rothko

Rundum (founded/asutatud 2013)

2 Locations for the exhibition

2015Google map(Courtesy the artists)

Tallinn based Rundum has been invited to occupy one of the galleries of EKKM for the duration of the Prosu(u)mer exhibition. As a self-defined independent creative platform, the group have been operating as a peripatetic artist-run-space since 2013. They organise exhibitions in various spaces across the city and run a programme of discussions, talks, film screenings and reading circles, primarily focusing on self-initiated practices, self employment and free form education. With Rundum promoting their own project within a curated exhibition, a mutually co-dependent relationship emerges— a logic similar to a social media platform thriving on user generated content. In this instance the host gives up curatorial control in a generous gesture and thus also passes on the labour and responsibility that it entails. The artists take on the responsibility and do so for reasons of their own, perhaps to verify Rundum’s reputation by feeding from the exposure of a bigger show, or perhaps to play a different game altogether. In any case, the freedom they have been offered comes with no guarantees, only the promise of an audience, offered in return for, well, the promise of an audience.

Rundum (founded/asutatud 2013)

Näituse 2 asukohta

2015 Google´i kaart (Kunstnike loal)

Tallinnas baseeruv Rundum vastas kutsele hõivata üks ruum EKKMis Prosu(u)meri näituse ajaks. Isemääratletud sõltumatu loominguline platvorm on 2013. aastast tegutsenud grupina kui rändav kunstike algatus. Nad organiseerivad näitusi erinevates ruumides ja veavad programmi diskus-sioonide, vestluste, skriiningute ja lugemisringidega keskendudes peamiselt omaalgatuslikele praktika-tele, füüsilise isiku ettevõtlusele ja hariduse vabale vormile. Rundumi enda projekti propageerimine kureeritud näituse kontekstis tekitab vastastikku sõltuva seose – sarnase loogikaga areneb sotsiaal-meedia platvorm kasutaja loodud sisu tulemusena. Sellel juhul annab muuseum helde žestina käest ära kuratoorse kontrolli ning seega annab edasi ka sellega kaasneva töö ja vastutuse. Kunstnikud võtavad vastutuse endale, kuid teevad seda neile teadaolevatel põhjuselt näiteks Rundumi reputatsiooni kinnitamiseks, saades kasu suurema näituse nähtavusest või mängides hoopis mingit muud mängu. Igal juhul on neile pakutud vabadus ilma igasuguste garantiideta, pakkumisel on ainult publik vastutasuks publiku eest.

Liina Siib (1963)

Study for exhibition furniture

2015Digital image(Courtesy the artist)

Liina Siib’s dual-screen video shows the seemingly endlessly looping whirl of the production line at a mineral water processing plant on the German island of Sylt. The style at first feels nostalgic, it seems like it could be from any episode of How Do They Do That? But gradually it becomes apparent that this is a contemporary factory, computer controlled and almost fully automated. This almost becomes the subject of the film: the slight relation between the factory and its workers. The men (and they are all men) seem to tinker with the machine; they seem almost insignificant in the face of this relentless clatter of vessels. At the same time, it feels like the machine would stop without them, if the odd bottle wasn’t jiggled, or the occasional spill mopped. In the end, we can’t help but ask the question of who is there for whom?

The relentless structure of the conveyor system finds an oddly well-fitting soundtrack in the freewheeling improvisational music of krautrock pioneers Amon Düül II. When we know that the group emerged from the ’60s West German political art commune Amon Düül, our comprehension of the relationship between video and soundtrack evolves. The band formed initially to fund the commune, with everyone who lived there joining in to play music whether or not they had any experience or ability. This radical idea for a way to earn a living offers a stark counterpoint to choice of the factory worker. Are the choices of the ’60s relevant to today or are they nothing more than a nostalgic soundtrack? The furniture used throughout EKKM has been especially produced by Siib for this exhibition. The blocky structures, equal parts Ettore Sottsass and contemporary gallery povera were originally conceived as part of a determinedly un-ergonomic domestic interior for her exhibition A Woman Takes Little Space at the 54th Venice Biennale.

Liina Siib (1963)Näitusemööbli eskiis

2015 Digitaalne kujutis (Kunstniku loal)

Liina Siibi kahe ekraaniga videos on näha Saksamaal Sylti saarel asuva mineraalveetehase tootmisliini näiliselt lõputut keerlemist. Stiil tundub esmapilgul nostalgiline, nagu oleks video pärit mõnest 1990. aastate teadussaatest. Ajapikku saab selgeks, et tegu on nüüdisaegse tehasega, mis on peaaegu täiesti automatiseeritud. Sellest hetkest muutub suhe tehase ja tema töötajate vahel peaaegu filmi põhiteemaks. Mehed – sest kõik töötajad on mehed – nokitsevad midagi masina kallal, kuid tunduvad pudelite lõputu kõlina taustal peaaegu tähtsusetuna. Samas on tunne, et masin jääks ilma nendeta seisma – kui nad mittesobivat pudelit välja ei praagiks või tekkinud veeloiku ära ei koristaks. Lõpuks peame ikkagi küsima, kes keda seal teenib?

Tehaseliini lakkamatult toimivale mehhanismile pakub ootamatult hästisobivat taustamuusikat krautrock’i pioneeri Amon Düül II vaba impro-visatsioon. Teades, et see rühmitus kasvas välja 1960. aastate Lääne-Saksa poliitilisest kunsti-kommunist Amon Düül, muutub meie arusaam video ja heliriba suhetest mitmekihilisemaks. Bänd loodi algselt kommuuni rahastamiseks ja kõik, kes seal elasid, osalesid muusika tegemises hoolimata sellest, kas neil oli vastav kogemus või oskus. Selline radikaalne viis elatist teenida vastandub järsult tehasetööle. Kas 1960. aastatele omased valikud on tänapäeval endiselt ajakohased või on tegu kõigest nostalgilise taustamuusikaga?

EKKMis kasutatav mööbel on Liina Siibi poolt spetsiaalselt selle näituse jaoks toodetud. Kandiline struktuur, Ettore Sottsassi võrdsed osad ja kaasaegse galerii esteetika oli algselt kavandatud 54. Veneetsia biennaali jaoks Liina Siibi näituse “Naine võtab vähe ruumi” sihikindlalt mitteergonoomilise koduse interjööri osana.

Philippe Thomas (1955)

Chiat/Day/Mojo,Readymades belong to everyone

1990Offset print on paper152,5×102 cm(Courtesy Jan Mot, Brussels)

Readymades belong to everyone was created by the New York agency Chiat/Day/Mojo for the exhibition Art & Publicité at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 1990–91, which was exploring the previous hundred years of the relationships between art and advertisement and examining how publicity established itself as an aesthetic and semantic reference for art. The project by Philippe Thomas took the form of an international competition for an advertisement for his agency readymades belong to everyone, in which five advertising companies participated. The poster by Chiat/Day/Mojo was awarded as well as subsequently reproduced and used as advertisement in public space.

Philippe Thomas (1955)Chiat/Day/Mojo, Readymade´id kuuluvad kõigile

1990 Offset trükk paberil 152,5×102 cm(Jan Mot galerii (Brüssel) loal)

Teose „Readymade’id kuuluvad kõigile” lõi New Yorgi agentuur Chiat/Day/Mojo 1990.–1991. aastal Pariisis Pompidou keskuses toimunud näitusele „Art & Publicité”, mis käsitles kunsti ja reklaami suhet eelneva saja aasta jooksul, uurides, kuidas reklaam kehtestas ennast kunsti esteetilise ja semantilise referentsina. Philippe Thomase projekt kujutas endast rahvusvahelist reklaamivõistlust „Readymade’id kuuluvad kõigile”, millest võttis osa viis reklaamifirmat. Võitjaks osutus Chiat/Day/Mojo plakat, mida kasutati reklaamina avalikus ruumis.

Kohei Yoshiyuki (1946)

Untitled. From the series The Park

1971Silver gelatin print41×51cm(Courtesy Yossi Milo, New York)

Kohei Yoshiyuki began making his series in the early 1970s, having literally stumbled on a couple having sex on the grass while he walked though Chuo Park in Shinjuku late one summer’s evening. He then noticed another couple crouching behind a tree clandestinely watching the pair on the ground. Intrigued, he spent the next six months befriending the Peeping Toms in the park before photographing them in action using infrared film and flash bulbs. He later said: «I went there to become a friend of the voyeurs. To photograph the voyeurs, I needed to be considered one of them. I behaved like I had the same interest as the voyeurs, but I was equipped with a small camera.» The resulting photographs, taken in three of Tokyo’s parks, Shinjuku, Yoyogi and Aoyama, capture the illicit sexual encounters, both heterosexual and homosexual, that frequently occurred there under the cloak of darkness. Images from “The Park” not only reveal hidden sexual exploits but also uncover many spectators ardently lurking, ever closer, waiting to join in. As we look at these voyeurs, caught in the act by another voyeur, though one with a camera, it is easy to ask if we become voyeurs too. But in our culture of surveillance and the selfie, perhaps when we look at these images today the questions that linger the longest are those around complicity and performance.

Kohei Yoshiyuki (1946)Nimetu. Seeriast Park

1971Hõbeželatiinfoto 41×51cm(Kunstniku ja Yossi Milo galerii (NY) loal)

Kohei Yoshiyuki alustas oma seeriaga 1970. aastate alguses pärast seda, kui ta Shinjukus Chuo pargis sõna otseses mõttes murul seksiva paari otsa oli komistanud. Samal korral märkas ta teist paari puu taga küürutamas ja salaja maas lamavat paari piilumas. Sellest haaratuna veetis ta järgmised kuus kuud esmalt piiluritega tutvust sõlmides ja siis neid infrapunafilmi ja –välguga pildistades. Hiljem ütles ta: „läksin, et vuajeristidega sõbraks saada. Nende pildistamiseks pidin saama üheks neist. Näitasin välja, et mul samad vuajeristlikud huvid, kuid mul oli kaasas väike kaamera.” Tulemuseks on kolmes Tokyo pargis – Shinjuku, Yoyogi ja Aoyama pargis – tehtud fotod, mis jäädvustavad seksi avalikus ruumis, nii hetero kui ka geiseksi, mis seal tihti pimeduse varjus aset leidis. Pargis tehtud pildid ei paljasta mitte ainult varjatud vahekordi, vaid ka rohkelt pealtvaatajaid, kes innukalt aina lähemale hiilivad, oodates võimalust ka osa saada. Vaadates neid vuajeriste, kes on teise vuajeristi kaamera ette sattunud, võin kergesti tekkida küsimus, kas oleme ka ise vuajeristiks muutunud, kuid meie tänase jälgimisühiskonna ja selfide kultuuris jääb kõige kauemaks kõlama küsimus osalusest ja esitusest.

untitled - echo gone wrong

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