Performa09 , the Vera List Center and Parsons present the American premiere of Museum Futures: Distributed at the New School auditorium, Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, 66 Fifth Avenue, NY, NY

Museum Futures: Distributed is a machinima record of the centenary interview with Moderna Museet’s executive Ayan Lindquist in June 2058. It explores a possible genealogy for contemporary art practice and its institutions, by re-imagining the role of artists, museums, galleries, markets, manufactories and academies.

The project was commissioned by Moderna Museet Stockholm, Sweden, on the occasion of its 50th anniversary in 2008.

This is a short text that accompanied an exhibition at Chelsea Space in London, January 24th - March 3rd 2007

The ice trade, that is the trade in huge cubes of ice hewn from the frozen lakes of North America or Scandinavia and shipped to warmer climes, exists somewhere between brute fact and fairytale.

The trade existed, flourished even, throughout the later part of the 19th century. Grainy photographs depicting sawn meter square cubes of ice, cut from the frozen crusts of freshwater lakes are waiting, stored as documents in relevant archives. You can visit luxury loft apartments inserted into the hollow remnants of bunker-like Ice houses – warehouses for frozen water - found in many former ports of Britain, especially in Bristol, Liverpool, and London. There is also compulsive testimony from the American author, naturalist and philosopher Henry David Thoreau writing one of the foundational texts of the environmental movement, Walden (published in 1854). Thoreau records the cold winter of 46/7 when from the window of his forest cabin he sees the frozen skin of Walden pond being stripped by a hundred Irish labourers, and carted away.

‘[….] in a good day they could get out a thousand tons, which was the yield of about one acre.’

From 11am to 4pm on Saturday 25th April 2009, I'll be taking part in Kindival an event organised by student campaigner Tom Robbins. It's a series of talks, discussions, exhibitions  and performances that explores the theory and practice of kindness.

I'll screen, give-away and talk about Screen Tests. I'll suggest how restriction and scarcity in the artworld can be replaced by generosity and abundance - at least in the political economy of digital artefacts.

It will take place at Chelsea College of Art & Design.

We had a really interesting and lively seminar organised by Pablo Lafuente and Melissa Gronlund of Afterall and Emily Pethwick of  The Showroom Gallery.