110 research outputs found
Spaces of Speculation: Movement Politics in the Infrastructure - An Interview with Marina Vishmidt
No full textLast February, Marina Vishmidt and I met in London where we discussed her book Speculation as a Mode of Production: Forms of Value Subjectivity in Art and Capital (2018) in the Historical Materialism Book Series. We then planned to collaborate on an event in New York that Spring. When that didn’t happen, we recorded a short interview for the e-flux podcast, but wanted to keep the conversation going. In the ensuing months, we emailed and added notes to a shared doc discussing, among much else: her book and how her arguments on artistic and financial speculation and infrastructural critique related to our shared interests in ‘art activism’ and some of the shortcomings of aesthetic theory; the pandemic and multiple crises of social reproduction that it would, did, and continues to set forth; the police and state violence in the US and elsewhere that only increased unabated as crumbling welfare systems unleashed further austerity; on the autonomous and extra-parliamentary responses to racialized capitalist crisis that manifested themselves and developed in the streets; and much else. After many months of exchange and discussion, we have collected and condensed our thoughts here
A Conversation: Melanie Gilligan and Marina Vishmidt
No full textNot Working brings together the contributions by artists, theorists and writers who in their work examine the interdependence of artistic production and social class. The complex structures and substantial rise in social inequalities, particularly visible in light of the current pandemic, have given the concept of class a wide range of connotations. Despite the ongoing attempts to view contemporary art in the sense of “class homogeneity”; it remains complicit in the reproduction and masking of existing conditions which it often claims to overcome. The texts in this book form a ground were class can be mediated with respect to artistic practices and other structures in the art world.
Published on the occasion of the exhibition Not Working, Artistic production and matters of class at Kunstverein München September 12 – November 22, 2020
Uncorporate Identity: Metahaven
No full textUncorporate Identity engages design and architecture in the context of geopolitical crisis. The book drafts a new kind of political arena--one where the symbols of central power (monarchy and state) thrive on the dynamics of information networks and their transformative political effects, and vice versa. Bridging between graphics, architecture, branding and research, Uncorporate Identity defies easy categorization as a design monograph. Organized as a sequence of five chapters, each comprising case studies, notes and essays, it explores, visually and textually, the paradoxes of identity in a networked world. Uncorporate Identity is authored by Metahaven (Daniel van der Velden and Vinca Kruk) with Marina Vishmidt, and has contributions by Boris Groys, David Singh Grewal, Vladimir Kolossov, Keller Easterling, Dieter Lesage, China Miéville, Chantal Mouffe, Pier Vittorio Aureli, Bruno Besana, Michael Taussig, Regula Stämpfli, Mihnea Mircan, Florian Schneider, Marina Vishmidt, and others
Généalogies de l’autonomie
No full textLe numéro de Perspective sur l’autonomie pour lequel nous avons cette conversation semble faire partie d’une constellation de publications et de rencontres consacrées à la question. Marina Vishmidt et moi-même avons participé à un colloque à Paris sur le sujet et je crois savoir que d’autres colloques et conférences se tiendront dans un avenir proche.Comme le laissent entendre ces événements, l’autonomie de l’art est une fois encore à l’ordre du jour pour répondre aux évolutions des politiqu..
Look at Hazards, Look at Losses
No full textLook at Hazards, Look at Losses developed out of a series of conversations, exchanges and visits between kuda.org, Anthony Iles and Marina Vishmidt over 2015-2017 through which different approaches to common problems of cultural production in early-21st century Europe and its peripheries were debated and conceptually probed. Setting out from Theodor W. Adorno’s concept of ‘the aesthetic relations of production’, these discussions proceeded to explore problems bearing upon organisation in small groups in the field of culture, philosophical idealism and materialism, poetry, error, and crisis. The anthology assembled reflects these concerns through engagement with the writing of others who have helped orientate us through these discussions. Seven original contributions by poets and theorists attempt to move toward new political interventions in culture and beyond ‘crisis as a way of life’
Speculation as a Mode of Production: Forms of Value Subjectivity in Art and Capital
No full textIn Speculation as a Mode of Production: Forms of Value Subjectivity in Art and Capital, Marina Vishmidt offers a new perspective on one of the main categories of capitalist life in the historical present. Writing not under the shadow but in the spirit of Adorno’s negative dialectic, her work pursues speculation through its contested terrains of philosophy, finance, and art, to arrive at the most detailed analysis that we now possess of the role of speculation in the shaping of subjectivity by value relations. Featuring detailed critical discussions of recent tendencies in the artistic representation of labour, and a brilliant reconstruction of the philosophical concept of the speculative from its origins in German Romanticism, Speculation as a Mode of Production is an essential, widescreen theorisation of capital’s drive to self-expansion, and an urgent corrective to the narrow and one-sided periodisations to which it is most commonly subjected
Reproducing Autonomy: Work, Money, Crisis and Contemporary Art
No full textProgress in autonomy cannot be – nor historically has it ever been – measured in quantitative units. Rather, the need for autonomy is repositioned in relation to society’s political, economic, and cultural developments on an ongoing basis. What do we mean when we speak of ‘autonomy’ and ‘reproduction’ in the field of contemporary art? What kind of objects do these terms encompass, what are their histories, and what internal logical relations can we identify between these concepts? How do they operate in a philosophical discourse about art and in political theory and practice?
In this book, Marina Vishmidt and Kerstin Stakemeier analyse ‘autonomy’ and then ‘reproduction’, in the understanding that this method of categorical isolation must be overcome if we are to reach towards the relationship of the two terms. These three essays establish a new framework to locate notions of artistic autonomy and autonomies of art. The texts not only offer an entrance into thinking about the role that autonomy has occupied in modern European intellectual history; they also put forward an original thesis
End-of-the-World Trade: On the Speculative Economies of Art and Extraction
No full textFri 21 June 3pm – 6pm : RHB 342
Sat 22 June 10 – 6 pm : RHB 312
This two-day event explores how ‘end-of-the-world’ scenarios and processes have given financial capitalism a new lease of life.
Bringing together researchers, artists, theorists the event will consider how over the last decade financialisation has mutated new techniques of value extraction and emulation. All of which indicate emerging frontiers of social struggle spanning cultural, digital, geological, biological and sensual fields of knowledge and experience.
The two watchwords of the larger research programme for this event are ‘extraction’ and ‘mimesis’. Extraction inasmuch as the scraping of value from exhausted resources is the current model of endgame capitalism, from the ‘gig economy’ to socially and geophysically devastating mining to the energy demands of the infrastructure servicing the digital economy, with cryptocurrency mining as the nexus where dominant as well as emergent models of social and energy extraction collide and comply. Here, emulation plays an important role, as capital increasingly mimics human biology and social exchange for profit, while the human and the social needs to retrofit itself as forms of capital in order to survive in a landscape of scarcity, commodification and debt. Mimesis is the worldmaking side of emulation, however, recalling aesthetic philosophies which re-imagine the nature-culture divide as not moving from exploitation to immersion, as much ‘new materialist’ thinking does, but to forms of mutual re-invention and adaptability which requires a profound shift in the material and social boundaries that reproduce nature and culture as polarities and as sites of escalating crisis. Art and financial technologies, specifically cryptocurrencies and all digital ledger-based forms of accounting, encapsulate both sides of the extraction/mimesis continuum, particularly with how contemporary cultural and political practices bring up close the agency of financial technologies in expanding the space of incalculability and contingency but also in enclosing the incalculable and sensate in routines of financial accumulation and extraction.
With the participation of Dele Adeyemo, Josephine Berry, Marleen Boschen, Dhanveer Brar, Ami Clarke, João Enxuto & Erica Love, FRAUD, Elizabeth Johnson, Costas Lapavitsas, Jorge Lucero Diaz feat. Ramon Amaro and Amazon Prime Queen (Victoria McKenzie), Le peuple que manque, Rachel O’Reilly, Emily Rosamond, and Mi You.
Organised by Marina Vishmidt (Media, Communications and Cultural Studies) & Louis Moreno (Visual Cultures)
Supported by the CHASE Doctoral Training Partnership + the Digital Worldmaking Stream (Technologies, Worlds, Politics
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