Nicholas O’Brien and Andrew Norman Wilson present the core principles and strategies of Norm’s work with organizations such as Google, Get Friday, Pond 5, and more.
A Bad At Sports production.
doubleunderscore.net/ (Nicholas O’Brien)
badatsports.com/
Nicholas: Playfulness exists in many aspects of a visual paradigm, these are facilitated through exposing the limited (or conversely expansive) scope of familiar office/corporate technology. A decision was made to use these technologies as critical tools for personal reflection.
Norm: Growing up father made job charts in Microsoft Excel that assigned monetary value to chores expected to be completed by the sons – setting the dinner table for 10 cents, feeding and hydrating the rabbit for 20 cents, cleaning the bathroom for five dollars, etc. While this job chart system offered a certain autonomy to afford recreational and cultural experiences – such as buying rollerblades from Sports Authority to roll around town with friends and renting strange movies from Blockbuster – it was also a form of training into a paid labor system that one enters for, say, ones first job as a photo lab technician at CVS pharmacy at the age of 14. The administration, commodification, and corporatization of really everything on earth makes these technologies and aesthetics an unavoidable inspiration and/or concern for contemporary cultural production.
Bureaucratic and institutional aesthetics have been appropriated in conceptual art since its beginnings, and this strategy is still widely recognized as effective.
Whether one appreciates it or not, corporate aesthetics and technologies have become a common language for people all around the world, a common language that can be reprogrammed to deliver resistant or more complex messages, or different affective experiences than what they are meant to produce. Art history provides certain conceptual and material tools, but there are others out there that need to be grappled with as potentials and problems.
One can take these technologies and aesthetics as they are and re-present them, but what’s more interesting is to combine and rearrange these oppressive processes and patterns in order to create new moiré patterns for desire and knowledge to flow through and explode, opening them to a conceivably infinite array of forces. This leads to deeply heterogeneous flows of cultural production, wherein culture, and life in general, can be understood as a living, involuted and expansive process rather than an entry on a spreadsheet.
Alongside the more immediate content of the project, the Virtual Assistance offices suggest the complex and ambiguous ways artistic production and education inhabit corporate processes.
In abandoning the autonomy of the artwork, one can develop resistant approaches to a world increasingly determined by commercial strategies and market concerns.
FlowSpot shifts focus from corporate worker to leisure consumer, placing more emphasis on play than critique. Whereas Virtual Assistance involves attempts to “get to the bottom of things,” FlowSpot emerges from circulation itself, mobility itself, and the proliferating Image(s) of globalization and futurity that are seemingly disconnected from their modes of production and organization. FlowSpot reflexively operates within the experience economy – where experience itself becomes a commodity – that not only produces certain arrangements within art fairs and biennials (where lounges, lounges as sites for art, and lounges as art all melt together), but also airport lounges, hotel lounges, mall lounges, and bank lounges. These are highly concentrated areas of exchange, transformation and passage, meeting places between a delocalized technical culture and a localized global culture. They make up the urban field, which is no longer the domain of a civic openness (as the traditional city was), but the territory of a middle-class culture, characterized by increasing mobility, mass consumption, and mass recreation.
There are obvious anxieties over entering the urban field, and in spaces of travel or consumption we carry soothing attachments into what are meant to be soothing environs. Airport design is often geared towards lowering stress levels through safe, coherent, understated, antiseptic, environs. An architecture of feeling, where effected passengers are more susceptible to parting with their cash and less susceptible to act in unexpected ways. The act of consumption as a soothing experience in and of itself. And then there are massage kiosks, oxygen lounges, even full blown airport spas offering aromatherapy facials, lap pools, saunas, steam rooms, and tanning booths. Affective labor and the products of manufactured labor fulfill individual needs and desires, blurring vocation and vacation while concealing the conditions and experience of their production.
Nicholas: Working with reoccurring themes around labor issues in network environments can highlight the tension and global fiscal – but more importantly human – cost of the expanding leisure class. What strategies can be developed to talk about this contested area of debate? How can one step outside of the already embedded nature of the information-age? Can one still consume in a subversive manner?
Even in states of abject avoidance of all things corporate, we still unintentionally participate in those systems of dominance on a consistent basis. Finding new locations for placing these anxieties through effective interstitials is more imperative than ever since the distance between the so-called avant-garde and mass entertainment industry is quickly becoming shorter and shorter.
Norm: Start with a desire to not only reflect and refract social, cultural, and economic arrangements of a privileged elite, but also to alter them, however miniscule the change may be. While the image of outsourcing, or the “global” in general, is seductive, considerations must be made about what produces it: the procedural, political, social, and economic characteristics of a particular situation, and the process of translating them into devices that enable us to rethink that very situation. Attempts must be made to rematerialize and relocalize the global. Take current conceptions of the global, and accompany them back to the multitude of rooms in which the global is produced, as well as the rooms, spaces, and temporal conditions that this production tends to ignore. “Internet art” here is not a phenomenological engagement with the idealized, abstract concept of “cyberspace;” but rather a provocative and socially productive treatment of the Internet as a fundamental component of contemporary conditions of economic and social production.
Lets say you live in San Francisco and are, of course, hanging out and working on projects with self-identifying Marxists and anarchists. And perhaps you work as a video editor for Google at their headquarters in Mountain View. The friends, readings, and collaborations informing your thoughts are present in your mind throughout your working day. You would inevitably become very sensitive to not only the newer forms of immaterial and informational labor, but also the continued reliance on hierarchical arrangements and routine unskilled labor.
Though web services are presented as seamless and effortless to users, Google Books, for instance, is a massive organizing force of people, materials, and capital, involving full time and contracted employees, partnerships with libraries, and a class of workers treated as nonexistent even within Google’s intranet and corporate campus, performing the labor of digitization – both high-tech and routine, informational and manual.
The complex informational mediation performed by Google is presented as a transparent, high-tech skein, which guarantees the users and citizens and consumers’ free choice, who use and vote and buy while surfing on the ‘free’ Web managed by Google, for the commonwealth. As a result of this mediation, there is an enactment of invisibility as well as visibility. Corporate functions necessitate invisibility.
To strategically expand the communicative commonalities that networked capital and technology afford, and to organize cooperations of accountability throughout them, one must work at recognizing and thrusting upwards into curvature that which becomes flattened by the privatization of what is common and the smoothing flows of concentrated capital and information.
Move beyond a reflection or refraction of corporate organization, and towards actualizing the virtual potential of a codified service relationship. Start with a series of questions to inform a strategy that offers onto-epistemological orientation. The questions also offer a standard of excellence for proposed objectives with which to compare actual outcomes. For instance – If power is defined as the ability to manipulate resources across space and time, to what extent can power between client and a corporate entity be re-distributed amongst a service where the normative use is a one-way command? How can this be reversed towards mutual assistance and collaboration? How can this relationship exceed the commodified forms of intimacy and creativity privileged by service-based economies? The critique is made through embodiment and materialization. What fails as business or liberatory politics succeeds as art.
In the post-Taylorist mode of production, importance is placed on the blurring of business relations towards the pursuit of professional or economic interests that incorporate personal relations, friendship, or trust in profit creation. This brings relations once defined precisely as “disinterested” into the commodity sphere. The ideal figure is a nomadic ‘network-extender’, light and mobile, tolerant of difference and ambivalence, realistic about people’s desires, informal and friendly, with a less rigid relationship to property—for renting and not absolute ownership represents the future.
The question of the actual nature of the relationship between people in a service industry network (when is it more “commercial,” and when is it more bound up with “genuine” feelings?) is always left in suspense, and invariably unanswered due to the intertwined relationship of relational protocols and “genuine” affect. These relationships may make people uncomfortable because it directly accepts that We The People Who Own Laptops are unavoidably engaged in these types of relationships, or often even more problematic relationships through the functions of capitalism. We don’t even need to stand up to recognize a reliance on cheap foreign labor—the evidence is on the tags of our clothing, inside the shells of our mobile devices, and on the other side of a phone call to the customer service divisions of our banks. Overcoming the limitations and failures of a sort of real-time social engagement with a particular form of this labor is a viable option.
Despite the goal of corporate online services to enhance value for their clients, profitability does not need to become the fundamental horizon for their usage. Profitability is a term of economic efficiency, and the inter-personal relationships made accessible by corporate entities can be rearranged to certain extents. Resistance can look very similar to business as usual.
The internet and the art we experience through it is inherently material-based. It is a complex apparatus that requires unprecedented reorganizations of resources such as energy and labor. We experience, lets say, a .jpg on a blog on a particular screen in a particular environment, all of which offer their own unique potentials in particular space-times. The informational material of the internet itself, even if we just reduce it to voltage in electronic circuits, has a mass and a charge that are inextricably intertwined with energy and capital infrastructures. And this voltage in electronic circuits is an analog medium. This understanding of the ecologies that our personal computing takes part in is crucial if artists explicitly engaging the internet are to have an impact on broader cultural planes.
Nicholas: FlowSpot provides a stage for audiences and consumers to reenact and inhabit an environment often allocated for cyber-specific leisure in a physical space. These actions and activities should be considered a type of performance, or an extension of the performance we are already enacting through the various screen-based projections of selves that users engage with on a daily basis. If one understands that the projection of ourselves into any given environment has now become dependent on the props and ephemera of our surroundings, then one can utilize FlowSpot modules as places to potentially subvert corporate visual culture and object-hood.
Norm: The FlowSpot tests are a way to use the lounge as a science fiction set for videos that address web-based product consumption and attempts at self-expression through those products. Science Fiction has become our neorealism – minus the political commitment to social change. Lives are color coordinated, recorded with webcams that give a sense of historical actuality and immediacy. the shooting studio is no more artificial than on-location shooting, public, private-corporate and private-personal space subsume one another, amateur production and performance is posted on the internet and immediately embraced. In one sense, the most intense aspect of our lives today is our sense of futurity, of continual innovation and continual product turnover; and yet this futurity has no other content than “more of the same” (or of what Ernst Bloch called “sheer aimless infinity and incessant changeability… a merely endless, contentless zigzag”). Thus, we are always being urged to upgrade our computers, which fall quickly into obsolescence through the force of Moore’s Law; we are always looking for the next iteration, the next hot thing, to such an extent that all fads and fashions seem to exist simultaneously. This urgency without change, or novelty without difference, is an expression of the commercial product cycle that dominates all aspects of our lives; it is the equivalent, on the level of content, of genre-conformity, as an expression of the claim that “There Is No Alternative”, on the level of form. The strategy of FlowSpot in this regard is not to offer a blatant critique, but to embody the situation so enthusiastically, and absolutely, as to push it to the point of absurdity.
The FlowSpot lounge is performative on its own – it does not discriminate between the human and the nonhuman. There are only actors – some human, some non-human – that exchange their properties. Performance art can be understood in the broader concept of performativity, which is used to elaborate on how both humans and nonhumans can perform through both language and matter.
We perform in commercial product cycles similarly to how we perform global labor relationships. Reflexively performing with a tool such as a personal outsourcing service could be seen as one large durational performance in which one is constantly trying to negotiate two scores – personal goals for a shared transformation and the limitations of a corporate contract. Finding a balance between these poles is a way of thinking through the operations we unconsciously perform daily by explicitly performing them differently. What networks need are ideas and aesthetic projects for how they might mature and transform, and sensitivities to both performativity and performance art, which are of course not mutually exclusive, can play an active role in this material-discursive practice.