1895,  cast in period costume

1. Establishing shot:

Mid shot: Large wooden factory gates.

Fade from black

Gates swing open, and workers stream from the factory; women, men, children, dogs, a few bicycles and eventually a horse drawn carriage.

2. Floating camera pulls back and slightly-up

Extreme close-up: The scene unfolding is seen to be on-screen.

3. Floating camera continues to pull back

Close-up:  The screen is of a mobile phone.

4. Floating camera continues to pull back

Medium close-up: Mobile phone recording the workers leaving the factory.

Fade to black

Total Duration: 47sec.

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.

I participated in Key Ideas one of a series of events organised by the Design Cluster at Camberwell College of Art Design. The series aims to examine issues and theories important to young designers.

Key Ideas: Object tackled the role of the object in contemporary society through multiple readings introduced by different experts via three themes:

Object as Sign

Object as Capital; the Value of Things

The Narrative of Objects

Guest speakers included: Grant Gibson, Neil Cummings, Stephen Hayward, Ralph Ball, Gareth Williams.

I spoke in relation to The Value of Things and tried to shift attention from objects to context; these are the notes for my presentation

I will be participating in a Public Body Barcamp. 

On Saturday 17th October at 14:00 at the Nowy Wspanialy Świat, Ul. Nowy Świat 63, Warsaw, Poland.

Jointly facilitated by Critical Practice - a cluster of artists, researchers, academics and others hosted by Chelsea College of Art & Design, London - and Free/Slow University Warsaw -  a nomadic centre of interdisciplinary studies, critical reflection, and independent thinking about art and society - the Public Body Barcamp is an extension of Publicamp. The assembly will be concerned with notions of being-in-public, and aims to explore ideas about the public body.

The Public Body Barcamp aims to examine the relationships among singular and assembled bodies, what infrastructures are necessary to facilitate a public body, public knowledge, art, social practice and fields of action in public space.