neil cummings

the enthusiast has the same relationship to capital as the gift to the commodity

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publication

I contributed a presentation to the International Conference: Free/SlowUniversity of Warsaw in October 2011, and two month later a beautiful 430 page publication is out. Amazing!

A JOY FOREVER: THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF SOCIAL CREATIVITY

Free/Slow University of Warsaw. Volume 4

New Book!

As part of Self Portrait; Arnolfini we have produced a beautiful celebratory publication, designed by Stephen Coates and developed in close collaboration with archivist Julian Warren.

Recalled from composite memory on the eve of our centenary in 2061, three relational threads are intertwined;

1. social and financial organisation

2. technological innovation

3. art and its institutions

You can read a data sprite snippet, or see how we developed the raw-text on this wiki.

The book is published by Arnolfini and available from Cornerhouse.

Walk through time

Walk through time on Sunday 25th September 2011, 12 - 1pm

Join me on Sunday 25th September between 12 - 1pm, with archivist Julian Warren and curator Nav Haq and we will walk through time on a tour of Self-Portrait: Arnolfini. The talk and tour, from 1831 to 2061, will culminating in the launch of Self-Portrait: Arnolfini the book of the project beautifully designed by Stephen Coates, especially for Arnolfini's 50th anniversary.

See the installation of Self Portrait, part 1, or part 2, or the Futures workshop

Arnolfini
16 Narrow Quay
Bristol, Avon BS1 4QA
0117 917 2300

Arnolfini: publication

As part of the Self Portrait; Arnolfini project we are making a publication of the relational timeline for the Birthday Celebrations. Recalled from composite memory in 2061, three threads are intertwined;

1. social and financial organisation

2. technological innovation

3. art and its institutions

You can see how the text develops, as we're writing it collaboratively on this wiki. The book should be ready for the party on September 23rd 2011.

A sample:

1851, The Great Exhibition

"A great people will invite all civilized nation to a festival, to bring into comparison the works of human skill. the organisatuon of this giant enterprise; the inclusion of every type of process of manufacture; the successful appeal to all clases of the population; the stimulation of trade, will commend this Exhibition to our ancestors, as it now does to ourselves." Henry Cole

Histories of the Present

In 2008 I took part in an event called Disclosures II: The Middle Ages it was part of Nottingham Contemporary’s Histories of the Present, and a beautiful publication of the year long series of events has just been published.

Disclosures II: The Middle Ages explored the idea of ‘commons’, both in the sense of agricultural commons (the grazing of animals and growing of crops on shared land) and what’s increasingly known as the ‘cultural commons’: the shared production and free distribution of digital resources, and more broadly culture in general.

Disclosures II: was set in the unique Nottinghamshire village of Laxton: unique in that it is the last substantial surviving example of the medieval ‘open field’ system of farming in England. In Laxton farmers farm individual strips of land in shared fields, now owned by the Crown, as they have done for centuries.

legacy publication

See more of PARADE and Critical Practice

PARADE booklaunch

PARADE: public modes of assembly and forms of address

I contribute to Critical Practice, a cluster of artists, researchers and academics hosted by the CCW Graduate School at Chelsea College of Art and Design. We have a longstanding interest in art, public goods, spaces, services and knowledge, and a track record of producing original, participatory events.

In a bespoke, temporary structure designed by award-winning architects we produced PARADE a programme of events that explored the diverse, contested and vital conceptions of being in public.

PARADE was so successful we were able to produce a legacy publication, the book will be launched on Thursday 3rd March at 5.30 pm with a conversation about public protest with Joseph Heatcott, in the lecture theatre at Chelsea College of Art and Design. Maybe see you there?

A Prior

Come and join me at the launch of the journal

A Prior #19: Olivia Plender

to coincide with an exhibition at Gasworks.

Wednesday, 25 November 2009
6.30 until 9pm

Donlon Books
210 Cambridge Heath Road
London E2 9NQ

I contributed a text inspired by Bouvard and Pecuchet.

The issue has been edited by Anna Colin, Kim Einarsson, Olivia Plender and Els Roelandt. Other contributors include Agnus Cameron, Rudi Laermans, Dieter Roelstraete, Frank Maes, Marina Vishmidt, Robert Storr, Goldin & Senneby, Pablo Bronstein, Runo Lagomarsino, and others.

see you there!

[...] The great long wave of financialization, in which every need and desire is reconfigured as an asset to be securitized and competitively traded, only succeeded in submerging the world in a deluge of financial technologies.

Flaubert’s 19^th century satire of Bouvard and Pecuchet, has returned as tragedy. Adrift in a world of our own-making, alienated by knowledge that returns to us as failure, we the financialized middle-class are indeed the new cognitive proletariat. And all the while, distributive markets endure, even flourish. Connecting peoples’ needs and desires through material things, via mediums of exchange, interlocked to form an ecology.

To imagine the world as a competitive market was to invite our own alienation from it.