“An anti-progress report” is a public “studio talk” made in relation to Konstfack’s exam shows May, 2012.

A studio talk is a format often used in art schools for meeting and discussing a students artwork and is most commonly done on individual bases, between a professor and a learner. In this public studio talk I will not speak about my art, instead I will use the opportunity to reflect on the exit my class and I are about to make.

Although this “ceremony” will be in the spirt of finalisation, of ending, of the last talk, the deadline, the mortal end, the cul-de-sac, the exit and the swallowing of the anti-progressive pill, it will open up the most private part of my doings. With other words, my diary will lay half open for you all during this talk/discussion. I will practice, if it is possible, to unleash the “magic” in my body or at least to see if we can together do this. Although it is called to be an exit, it is also concerned with what it means to emerge, to emerge as an artist, to become an emerging artist. Who submerge? What disappears? With other words: where is the emergency exit!?

Turning into an object

———————–

“Studio talk”

Refused entrance:

—–

On another note: I attended a workshop at Slakthus ateljerna yesterday, as I have been asked to make a performance there later this year, I attended a workshop with Mats Rosengren (professor in rhetoric at Södertörn University) and he talked about Cornelius Castoriadis and his concepts of “Social Imaginary Matter”. It was interesting and I am not totally sure how it differed from the concepts of Italian Workers-Autonomous. But I liked the idea connected to autonomous and rationality and one sided logic, Rosengren talked about how everything in a heteronomous is the belief that everything comes down to one (being God, Big bang or whatever one prefers to believe in), while the theory of Castoriadis opens this up and deals with the now. It is interesting to think about this in relation to myth making and the feeling that there are “higher powers” such as school adminstration, reforms, government, the feeling of hitting walls with ones idea, about how one can reorganize oneself and build from the ground, reorganize the people attending.

——

Hi M.

“The Spring Exhibition / Examination (30 ECTS)
(Opening: May 16. Building starts May 7. Dismantling May 28 to May 30)
Your Exam project will be presented to the public at Konstfack’s Spring Exhibition. If your major project is planned for a public context outside of the school, the project must be represented in the exhibition through coherent documentation. The documentation can act as support during the oral presentation at the examination day, and will make the project accessible for exhibition visitors.
Each personal tutor has a group of students to grade. He/She approves your approach to the master project, and follows your progress continuously during the academic year. If your project does not meet expected artistic quality and the learning objectives outlined in the Master Program curriculum, it is the tutor’s duty to intervene and warn you of the risk of failure in the early stages of the proposed project development. On the day of examination, which takes place during the Spring Exhibition, it is the tutor’s role to steer the discussion to critically engage with the student’s project from relevant points of view, and to keep the discussion fruitful and constructive, within the time allocated.
The Guest Critic is a person external to Konstfack, who has been selected by the tutor in discussion with colleagues involved in the APR MA program. This person could be a curator, critic, writer whose knowledge will benefit the process of assessing your achievement. The Guest Critic will visit your studio (for about 1 hour) before the examination date, in order to familiarise herself/himself with your project and will read your essay in advance.
On the examination day, which takes place during the Spring exhibition, it is also the critic’s role to contribute to a wider discussion of the student’s work raising issues, relevant to the project by relating it to areas of interest within existing art practice and its discourses.
Responsible for coordinating the Spring Exhibition is Gunilla Bandolin.
More detailed guidelines of the examination will be provided closer to the Spring Exhibition.” [quote course syllabus given in the beginning of year 2 at Konstfack]

Introduction to glossary.

“E.W: I agree, if one wants to look at the fundaments of production one has to look at the economy of production. Institutional overheads have to be turned around and faced towards us when we are listening. We can no longer stand behind and watch as it happens, instead we have to refuse see the objectives and begin to organise. As you have earlier been talking about refusal, or the idea of what happens to people that are refused entrance, is that what happened in the movement? you basically bracket it and study it? This study began by looking at the foundation of the building and thus began to see the cracks. I mean what is the educational turn? and what are the reforms that we don’t want to be part of? With other words, one begins to notice the object of the book, or begin to see the telephone as more than a communication device. The telephone as something more than a thing. I can clearly hear you and you can clearly hear me, but we can not know if a third party can hear this conversation. This is not the same as to see the end but to problematise the situation. To see beginnings rather than ends, or to see possibilities rather than impossibilities” [excerpt from an interview].



What you have here is an excerpt of the ongoing glossary of the research Overhead and Behind. It is not the end of the work and does not contain a conclusion, rather it is an attempt to draw out some of the key aspects connected with the research. The reason for structuring it as a glossary is because this format allows space for new entries, making it expansible as the research evolves, after I have left the Konstfack. Overhead and Behind relies on examining what one can learn from different words, the function of the glossary is thus to assist the development of the work and my practice as an artist. The glossary will allow itself this liberty, as the main motivations for writing are me learning about my practice and unlearning what one is expected to learn as artist. Overhead and Behind proposes irrationality, not in the sense of unquestionably following ones desire, but rather to insist on a leveling of reason and knowledge. It will appear rational, as the context for making the research (the institution) is rationality (perhaps it only listens to rationality!). This is an attempt to mediate irrationality and insist on non-objective knowledge that can re-valorize the valorization system it is part of. Overhead and Behind is best described as an ongoing learning exercise in three parts: Working Conditions, The Refusal of Objects and Disturbing Distribution (forthcoming). Through learning by doing, it unfolds new “episodes”¹ as an attempt to look at the act of orientating different standpoints. What combines the episodes is the act of working in collaboration with other theorists/artists/designers/choreographers etc. The episodes are often presented as performances or discussions.

The basic premise is that overhead and behind are both physical standpoints. Consequently the research examines these positions from a phenomenological perspective, as a lived process. The key aim is to connect the theoretical and practical parts by embodying the research. It aims to situate the orientation and location of the ground I am looking from. The task is to understand what is over-my-head, through the means of examining the ground under my feet, the ground that enables me to formulate and reformulate viewpoints. The ambiguity of understanding is consciously played with within this text, as this research began in response to my studies at the art academy, Konstfack. Academy are sites for learning, understanding and to prepare for work. In this instance understanding has a double meaning, firstly to understand the ground that one stands on, secondly what it is that one stands under when standing there, to under-stand.² This phenomenological perspective is therefore a way to designate the ground where knowledge is being generated and requires one to “understand” the body as the generator for this knowledge, as the site for work. Choosing this orientation for this text, does not mean to enable a more “solid soil” (objectivity), rather it is, as all orientations are, a way to “put some things and not others in our reach” [Ahmed, 2007:152]. It is an attempt, following a feminist tradition,³ to see where one is looking, what lies behind my orientation, the spectral structures behind my back and over my head, in order to enable other points of views.⁴

This glossary is an attempt to make more firm the writing practice related to Overhead and Behind and below is an overall structure for the research. Some glossary entries are more directly linked with the parts while other are more loosely connected. All will draw on the learnings from the related “tools” and “episodes”. For a detail description of the separate “episodes” and “tools” please see: www.1200m.org/jens/overhead-and-behind.


Overhead and Behind

TOOLS:
www.1200m.org, The Hills, Enlightenment Hearts

PARTS:
Working Conditions, The Refusal of Object, (Disturbing Distribution, forthcoming)

EPISODES:
A.S.A.P, Letter Refused, The Hills an example, Cover Story, A Form of an Object, The anecdote of Success, WE in Transmission, Department Meeting, New Approach, Wild Horses

1. See the entry for episodes
2. I like to thank the artworker Kevin Dooley who highlighted the complexity of the word “understanding”. Excerpt below from the episode Cover story act II: A Footnote of an Object (revisited in the form of a play) performed in Stockholm 2012, continues to discuss and play with this. In the roles me (editor), Sam Kennedy (Student body), Bernd Krauß (Fatherland) and Zoë Poluch (Mother Tongue).
   Student Body: who is everyone? we do not understand?
   Fatherland: It is good to make everyone think they understand
   Mother Tongue: It is everyones choice to understand
Fatherland: Let’s outsource understanding so we know who is behind it.
   Mother Tongue: Everyone understanding is behind!
   Student Body: why is everyone behind it?
   Fatherland: that way everyone understands that it is best to be behind
   Student Body: but we do not understand.
   Fatherland: What do you not understand?
   Student Body: We mean we don’t understand, we don’t under- stand you.
   Mother Tongue: What do you mean, you do not understand us?
   Student Body: We mean we don’t stand under you
   Fatherland: but without understanding, there is no progress
   Student Body: We object!
   Mother Tongue: What object?
   Fatherland: An object?
   Student Body: No, we object!

   See: http://www.1200m.org/jens/episodes/cover-story for video and full script.

3. “Feminist objectivity means quite simply situated knowledges” [Haraway, 1988:581]
4. A more direct inquiry of the architectural working structure of Konstfack can be found in my friend and colleague Sam Kennedy’s master theses Why are all the chairs at Konstfack red? [Kennedy, 2012]. This “project” makes an excellent inquiry into what it means to take up a chair as a student at Konstfack. It aims to drive the theses that one have to sit uncomfortably in order to learn something new. I do not fully agree with this idea, but rather follow Jacques Rancière argument of “dissensus… a conflict between a sensory presentation and a way of making sense of it” [Rancière, 2010:139]. This does not mean that it has to uncomfortable, rather it means that it has to be a disconnection between senses, which could potentially be a euphoric 
(sit)uation.

28/12/2011 “Reviewing Rancière; Or, the persistence of discrepancies” By: Bruno Bosteels, Published in: Radical Philosophy 176 (Nov/Dec/2011)

28/12/2011 “Red years; Althusser’s lesson, Rancière’s error and the real movement of history” By: Nathan Brown, Published in: Radical Philosophy 176 (Nov/Dec/2011)

17/12/2011 “Student problems” By: Louis Althusser, Published in: Radical Philosophy 176 (Nov/Dec/2011) (a lightly corrected reprint of the translation by Dick Bateman of part of Louis Althusser’s article ‘Problèmes étudiants’. Org. Pub. in La Nouvelle Critique 152 (01/1964) pp. 80-111. Bateman’s translation of ‘Student Problems’ first appeared in the journal Sublation (University of Leicester, 1967) pp. 14-22.

17/12/2011 “Introduction to Althusser’s ‘student problems’” By: Warren Montag, Published in: Radical Philosophy 176 (Nov/Dec/2011)

17/12/2011 “The valuation of nature; the natural choice white paper” By: Kathryn Yusoff, Published in: Radical Philosophy 176 (Nov/Dec/2011)

30/11/2011 “Debt by degree” By: James Surowiecki Published in: The Newyorker (21/11/2011)

29/11/2011 “Feminism, Finance and the Future of #Occupy – An interview with Silvia Federici” By: Max Haiven Published in: Zcommunications (25/11/2011)

25/11/2011 “Häxor söks i Gävle” By: Johanna Hejdenberg Published in: Arbetarbladet (22/11/2011)

17/11/2011 “#OccupyWallSt Roundup, Day 61″ By: Jillian Dunham Published in: The New York Times (17/11/2011)

17/11/2011 “Occupy Wall Street day of action – live coverage” Published in: The Guardian (17/11/2011)

13/11/2011 “The irony of the Anonymous mask” by: Leo Benedictus Published in: The Guardian (30/08/2011)

06/11/2011 “The Project Horizon: On the Temporality of Making” by: Bojana Kunst Published in: Le Journal des Laboratoires (08/2011)

05/11/2011 “Occupational Hazards” by: Hendrik Hertzberg Published in: The New Yorker (07/11/2011)

05/11/2011 “Sverige har förlorat nio av tio utomeuropeiska studenter” by: Börje Ekholm and Carl Bennet Published in: Dagens Nyheter (01/11/2011)

05/11/2011 “Sverige isoleras utan kompetenta forskare utifrån” by: Per Lindskog Published in: Dagens Nyheter (24/02/2011)

05/11/2011 “The Origin of Spray Paint” by: Hilary Greenbaum and Dana Rubinstein Published in: The New York Times (05/11/2011)

31/10/2011 “Playing Modern Detective In the Gunpowder Plot” by: Mel Gussow Published in: The New York Times (04/12/1996)

31/10/2011 “Guy Fawkes Gets a Last Laugh, 500 Years Later” by: Tim Murphy Published in: The New York Times (27/10/2011)

28/10/2011 “World as Medium: On the Work of Stano Filko” by: Jan Verwoert Published in: E-flux magazine (10/2011)

24/10/2011“UK university applicants drop by 12% before tuition fee rise” by: Jessica Shepherd Published in: The Guardian (24/10/2011)

15/10/2011 “Det är rätt att göra uppror – fast helst på nätet” by: Kristina Lindquist Published in: Dagens Nyheter (15/10/2011)

13/10/2011 “Occupy Wall Street protests are reclaiming the psychic space” by: Nina Power Published in: The Guardian (13/10/2011)

13/10/2011 ” ‘Human microphone’ at the Occupy Wallstreet open forum” by: Slavoj Zizek (10/9/2011)

12/10/2011 “World as Medium: On the Work of Stano Filko” by: Jan Verwoert Published in: E-flux #28 (10/2011)

12/10/2011 “Editorial for e-flux journal #28″ by: Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle Published in: E-flux #28 (10/2011)

11/10/2011 “When Was Modernism?” by: Raymond Williams Lecture given at University of Bristol, 1987.

21/09/2011 “We have never been modern” by: Bruno Latour Published by: Harvard university press (1993) originally published by: La Découverte (1991)

17/09/2011 “A review of Silvia Federici’s book: Caliban and the witch, women the body and primitive accumulation” by: Karl Kersplebedeb Published in: Upping the Anti (#2) in (2005-12)

15/09/2011 “As little time on the ground as possible” by: Chus Martinez Self-published (2011)

15/09/2011 “Etiopiens varnande exempel” by: Kerstin Lundell Published by: Dagens Nyheter (2011-09-13)

15/09/2011 “Europa: kris och slut?” by: Étienne Balibar Published by: Tankekraft (2010)

18/08/2011 “In the Place of the Public Sphere? Or, the World in Fragments” by: Simon Sheikh Published by: Republicart (06/2004)

18/08/2011 “The Strategy of Refusal” by: Mario Tronti Originally published by: DeriveApprodi (1966)

17/08/2011 Gasworks (2008)
For more audio documentation of “Disclosures” visit http://www.archive.org/details/Disclosures

12/08/2011 “Plundring substitut för shopping” by: Zygmunt Bauman Published in: Svenska Dagbladet (12/08/2011)

10/08/2011 “The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible” by: Jacques Rancière Published by: Continuum International Publishing Group; Pbk. Ed edition (December 2004)
See this for a short resumé of the book. by: Sean Sayers. Published by: www.culturemachine.net in 2005

10/08/2011 “There is a context to London’s riots that can’t be ignored” by: Nina Power Published by: The Guardian 10/08/2011

09/08/2011 “Här råder djungelns lag” by: Julia Svensson Published by: Dagens Nyheter 09/08/2011

28/07/2011 “The Zahir” by: Jorge Luis Borges, Published in: 07/1947

20/07/2011 “Politics of the Common” a [Contribution to the Reimagining Society Project hosted by ZCommunications] by: Michael Hardt Published by: ZCommunications 06/07/2006

15/07/2011 “SOIL” including the presentation Who I am and what I hate by: Kevin Dooley (a presentation for Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, Self published 2011

15/07/2011 “A Cautious Prometheus? A few steps toward a philosophy of design (with special attention to Peter
Sloterdijk)” by: Bruno Latour (a keynote lecture for History of Design Society, Falmouth, Self published 03/09/2008

13/07/2011 “Agonistic politics and artistic practices” by: Chantal Mouffe, 2009, Published by: www.newpatrons.eu 09/10/2009

11/07/2011 “On taking responsibility” (about the recent News of the world scandal) by: Nina Power, (self published 2011)

11/07/2011 “Dogtooth Dance (Kynodontas 2009)” by: Giorgos Lanthimos 2009

11/07/2011 “Decolonizing The Mind” by: DAAR (Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency) 2011

06/07/2011 “Don’t Panic, Organise! A Mute Magazine Pamphlet on Recent Struggles in Education” by: Mute Editorial Collective. Published by: MUTE books 2011, 20/01/2011

06/07/2011 “Soanyway River” by: Rei Terada. Self published, 06/07/2011

06/07/2011 “Tro inte att vi har glömt dig” by: Jonas Hassen Khemiri. Published in Dagens Nyheter, 05/07/2011

04/07/2011 “Against education cuts” by: Nina Power, Escalate and Emily Clifton. Published by Radical philosophy 2011, 01/07/2011

16/06/2011 “Kölumn genom spegeln: eller var går gränsen mellan det privata och det offentliga?” by: Laura Barlow om Bernd Krauss konstnärsskap. Published in: Paletten #1:2011 02/2011

16/06/2011 “Maybe it would be better if we worked in groups of three? Part 2 of 2: The Discursive” by: Liam Gillick. Published in “e-flux journal #3″ 02/2009

16/06/2011 “Maybe it would be better if we worked in groups of three? Part 1 of 2: The Discursive” by: Liam Gillick. Published in “e-flux journal #2″ 01/2009

16/06/2011 “Forces of Radical Pragmatism and Pirate Ethics: Brian Kuan Wood on the Work of Gean Moreno and Ernesto Oroza” by: Brian Kuan Wood. Published in: Paletten #1:2011, 02/2011

16/06/2011 “Putting feminism back on its feet” by: Silvia Federici. Published in Social text #9/10, The 60′s without apology (Spring – Summer, 1984) pp. 338-346, Duke University Press 2009

16/06/2011 “Inside the Box: Notes From Within the European Artistic Research Debate” by: Michael Baers. Published on “E-flux journal #26″ 06/2011

16/06/2011 “Anti-Disciplinary Feedback and the Will to Effect” by: Lars Bang Larsen. Published on “Metamute” 15/06/11

15/06/2011 “Why are conceptual artists painting again? Because they think it’s a good idea” by: Jan Verwoert. Published on “GSA events (www.gsaevents.com)” 2010

15/06/2011 Selected essays from “Support Structures” by: Céline Condorelli & Gavin Wade. Published by: Sternberg Press 2009

15/06/2011 “Feminism And the Politics of the Commons” by: Silvia Federici. Published in “The Commoner” 2011

15/06/2011 “Project Space Survival Strategies and the Future of the Art Economy” by: Elysa Lozano for Autonomous Organization. Published in: “ak28 revisited and three parallels”, Mount Analogue 2011

15/06/2011 “The Collaborative Turn” by: Maria Lind. Published in “Selected Maria Lind Writing”, Sternberg Press 2010

06/06/2011 “The Good of Work by: Liam Gillick. Published in E-flux #16 2010

06/06/2011 “The Emancipated Spectator” by: Jacques Rancière. Published by: Artforum 2007

27/05/2011 “Feynman on how difficult it can be to answer certain questions in layman’s terms” by: Richard Feynman

15/05/2011 “The Operation Was Successful But The Patient Died” by: Maija Timonen (Researcher Slade School of Art, London)

10/05/2011 “You Told Me” by: Magnus Bärtås, pp. 34-77. Published by: ArtMonitor 2010

04/05/2011“Save the University” by: Wendy Brown

03/05/2011

Workers Leaving the Googleplex by: Andrew Norman Wilson

03/05/2011 “In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective” by: Hito Steyerl

25/04/2011 “Rhizome (Whith no Return)” by: Éric Alliez. Published in Radical Philosophy #167 2011

23/04/2011 “Zizek is Not Okay” by: Rei Terada

22/04/2011 “Glossary of the Transformations and Struggles in the Global University” by: Edu-Factory collective

12/04/2011 “Happiness has been consumed by capitalism” by: Nina Power

10/04/2011 “What is a Commandment” by: Giorgio Agamben

10/04/2011 “Politics After Expectation” by: Rei Terada

08/04/2011 “Wittgenstein House” by: Hu Fang

08/04/2011 “Fragments Toward an Understanding of a Week that Changed Everything…” by: Precarious Workers Brigade

05/04/2011 “The Occupation Cookbook” or the Model of the Occupation of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb, Introductions by: Marc Bousquet and Boris Buden

25/03/2011 “UCL Students occupy in solidarity with our lecturers”

20/03/2011 “Do the right thing” by: Malmö fria kvinnouniversitet (MFK). Self-published 2011

18/03/2011 “People exposed, people as extras” by: Georges Didi-Huberman. Published in Radical Philosophy #156, 2009

18/03/2011 “Notes on the photographic image” by: Jacques Ranciere. Published in Radical Philosophy #156, 2009

18/03/2011 “Moral Politics” by: George Lakoff

18/03/2011 “The University-Factory?” by: Mick O’Broin

17/03/2011 “On Artistic Research, Thinking and teaching art: between practice and theoretical speculation Seminar” Participants: Tony Brown, Guadalupe Echevarría, Dora García, Dieter Lesage, Natascha Sadr and Jan Verwoert. At: MACBA

15/03/2011 “Open letter, the new and media law in Hungary” by: Ivan Andrassew

10/03/2011 Francoise Balibar

05/03/2011 “Test drive” by: Avital Ronell

23/02/2011 “Avgifter hot mot högre studier” by: STOCKHOLMSSTUDENTERNA

23/02/2011 “TAKE BACK THE DAY! I Want a Twenty-Four-Hour Truce During Which Is No Rape 1983″ by: Andrea Dworkin

23/02/2011 “We Will Not Pay”

22/02/2011 “Basic Concepts of Transcendental Materialism” by: Rainer E. Zimmermann

17/02/2011 “Capitalist Realism: Is there No Alternative?” by: Mark Fisher

17/02/2011 “Look out, it’s real: Documentary truth and tear gas” by: Hito Steyerl

16/02/2011 “Communiqué of Communication” The moves of the Austrian movement

16/02/2011 “Tariq Ali at SOAS occupation”

04/02/2011 “Something Other Than Administrated ‘Quality.’ Art Education and Protest 2009/1979″ by: Tom Holert

16/01/2011 “Feminism – a Manifesto for the Twenty first Century” by: Nina Power

16/01/2011 “Learning to breathe protest”. Published in: Variant #37, 2010

16/01/2011 “Post ideological generation speaks”

16/01/2011 “Being in the world in general as the basic state of dasein” by: Martin Heidegger

10/01/2011 “The Academy and The Corporate Public: – Old and New Monsters -” by: Stephan Dillemuth. Published in: Frieze, 2006

16/12/2010 “Immaterial Labour” by: Maurizio Lazzarato

16/12/2010 “(Extended) Footnotes On Education” by: Florian Schneider

06/12/2010 “A Thing Like You and Me” by: Hito Steyerl

06/12/2010 “In Defense of the Poor Image” by: Hito Steyerl

06/12/2010 “Recomposing the University” By: Tiziana Terranova & Marc Bousquet

06/12/2010 “Objects of Study or Commodification of Knowledge? Remarks on Artistic Research” by: Simon Sheikh

06/12/2010 “Artists and art schools: for or against innovation?” by: Angela McRobbie and Kirsten Forkert

28/11/2010 “Academy Effects Project Work as Emancipatory Practice” by: Beatrice von Bismarck

28/11/2010 “The Soviets of the Multitude: On Collectivity and Collective Work -An Interview with Paolo Virno” By: Alexei Penzin

28/11/2010 “Arbitrary Power Or, on Organization without Ends” by: Akseli Virtanen

28/11/2010 “We – Collectivities, Mutualities, Participations” by: Irit Rogoff

28/11/2010 “The Articulation of Protest” by: Hito Steyerl

28/11/2010 “Commonify Everything, Now.” AG WITCHCRAFT, The academy of refusal

28/11/2010 “Roots of Breakdance”

22/11/2010 “Vad är det för mening med livslångt lärande, om livslångt lärande inte har någon mening?” by: Gert Biesta

22/11/2010 “Participatory Economics” by: Michael Albert

12/11/2010 “What is an author?” by: Michel Foucault

12/11/2010 “Shoot it black!” An introduction to Želimir Žilnik, by: Boris Buden. Published in: Afterall #25, 2010

12/11/2010 “Another Criteria… or, what is the attitude of a work in the relations of production of its time?” by: Marion von Osten. Published in: Afterall #25, 2010

12/11/2010 “Playing the Wild Child: Art Institutions in a Situation of Changed Public Interest” by: Nina Möntmann”

12/11/2010 “THE POLITICAL AS A TRUTH” by: Alain Badiou

11/11/2010 “Slade Occupation Performance”

05/11/2010 “The Coming Insurrection” by: The Invisible Committee. Published by: Semiotext(e) 2007

05/10/2010 “Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999)” by: Mark Leckey

04/10/2010 “Launch of Skylab 4” by: CBS (originally live broadcasted 16/11/1973)

04/10/2010 “Is a museum a factory?” by: Hito Steyerl, Eflux Journal #7, 06/2009

04/10/2010 “public space as translation process” by: Boris Buden

04/10/2010 “Arbitrary Power -Or, on Organization without Ends” by: Akseli Virtanen

04/11/2010 “Headless body, Topless bar” by: Francis McKee published in Dot, Dot, Dot #19, 2009

04/11/2010 “Unicorn: ‘I exist’” by: Jan Verwoert. Published in Dot, Dot, Dot #19, 2009

04/11/2010 “What” by: George Perec

02/11/2010 “The hard way to Enlightenment” by: Stephan Dillemuth, orginally shown at Transmission Gallery 2010 and Manifesta8 Murcia, Spain 2010

01/11/2010 “What is the contemporary?” by: Giorgio Agamben

15/09/2010 “Dispersion08“ Seth Price

15/09/2010 “Whatever” by: Giorgio Agamben. Published in “The common community”, University of Minnesota press 1993

15/09/2010 Jill Johnston legendary speech at “Town bloody hall“

15/09/2010 “Game within the game: institution, institutionalisation and art education” by: Beatrice von Bismarck. Published in “Art and its institutions, current conflicts, critique and collaborations”, edited by: Nina Möntmann, Black Dog Publishing 2006

15/09/2010 “There is no alternative: THE FUTURES IS SELF-ORGANISED” by: Stephan Dillemuth, Anthony Davies, and Jakob Jakobsen. Published in “Art and its institutions, current conflicts, critique and collaborations”, edited by: Nina Möntmann, Black Dog Publishing 2006

15/09/2010 “Agoraphobia” by: Rosalyn Deutsche. Published in “Evictions”, The MIT press 1996

FIRMAFESTEN – THE SWEDISH DANCE HISTORY RELEASE EVENT

A contribution to the third issue of The Swedish Dance History published by Inpex.

Inpex invites you to celebrate the release of the third episode of The Swedish Dance History with a shebang party of un-imitable proportions under the auspices of the classic Firmafesten – sort of The Office Party. No, we are not about to mime such tacky thing in respect of expression. No party hats, ridiculous social-togetherness games or waking up after a failed one-night stand. This is Firmafesten in respect of celebrating our communality as dancers, choreographers, performers, students of dance, dance-theatre-executors, even light and set-designers are welcome, together preparing the revolution of movement and mystical compositions.

There will be no small performances, sitting in the auditorium suffering through excerpts of the coming season, or any other season for that matter. We’ll just be together; cook, dance, DJ, bake cakes, eat too much, drink, print t-shirt, upload something magical on Youtube, read the book, socialize, be family, enjoy a few 80s classics and perhaps somebody will like to sing a song. It’s gonna be you, me and all those lovely people we know and share with in dance and choreography. And goddamn we will also present them 1000 pages of the third edition of The Swedish Dance History, and guess what you can take home as many as you want.

So pull yourself together. If you have kids pick them up from kindergarten and come play with us (we offer candy and perhaps waffles), if you don’t (have kids) come and share all the time or go home and put the kids in bed and come later, finish an application with an emphasize on corporate relation and come really late, or just come. We start early and run until late, and promise there will be no creative DJ’ing or self-expressive dance. Just a crazy good firmafesten.

04.12.2011 SV: Exhibition in my apartment a project put together by Tove Eklund Lindskog. With contribution by Anne-Liis Kogan, Johanna Adeback, Lina Kruopyte, Thomas Chaffe, Johan Eldrot, Frida Klingberg, Pål Sommelius and myself. I performed the first act of “Cover story, Act I”.

29.11.2011—-11.12.2011 AS IF a project with myself, Chrisander Brun, Halla Ólafsdóttir and Zoë Poluch at: MDT

Description
For the duration of two weeks 4 artists will co-exist during working hours in the foyer of MDT, working alone but in parallel on an experiment that responds, resists, refutes, challenges, dismisses, confirms a series of statements provided by Zoë Poluch.

Truth Claim #1: We create meaning and vitality when our do-ings are self-valorized using self-determined criteria.
Truth Claim #2: We are in the same space and time and therefore fundamentally and necessarily affect one another’s do-ings.
Truth Claim #3: The holy trinity of authorship-spectatorship-objecthood is not a self-evident conceptual institution.

This is not about public space. This is public time. Free from commodification and an economy of scarcity we inhabit public time as if it captured a new order, any new order, yours, hers, his, ours and mine. What can we do, what will we do?

There are three rules:
We do not converse about what we do, we do not leave the space and we do not use computers.

Does art-making, world-making, and specifically our do-ings, glorify being in transit, always on a way to the next, to becoming another? Does this kill our fantasies and indignations to care about construing a work, a practice, a situation, a world with a different order? We will give life to a locality, while questioning and de-emphasizing the temporary nature of it. Well aware that there are infinite ways to build and ever infinite results of building we will commit to the as if model which is the basic logic of fiction. Our do-ings: our playing, working, making, performing, eating, thinking, being, dancing, reading, nothing, are enacted as if they incarnated a permanently other order.

Our public time is one of discrete attentions, of simultaneous but solitary engage-ings. It is a time of common yet heterogeneous purpose. There is no transcendence. We are here, particularly and specifically and this is where we situate and produce knowledge.

Do we see the aesthetics of decision making, specific to each artist or the production of a fifth entity that belongs to no one? Is this work? Is this the beginning of the future of ‘a work’, her, his, ours or my work? Is this individualist communality? Is this performance? Is this private? What is public? Can the power of naming, re-naming and un-naming what we do, thereby unhinging identity, be used as a tool to un-do what we know or where we situate this knowledge? Do you have any questions? Feel warmly welcomed to come and ask them or produce their answers from November 28 to December 10 at MDT.

16.11.2011—-16.12.2011 “A form of an object” together with Sam Kennedy as part of the exhibition “August 2002 – ongoing, and back” at Leeds college of art

05.10.2011 VOILA! ***** Enlightenment Hearts, Cooking Compendium #2 -Melted Ice-cream, why is there sand in my Pina Colada?****… click here for downloading the PDF.

19.09.2011—-6-10pm konstfack A10 Pecha Kucha, I will try to show some bits from “The anecdote of success”.

15.06.2011 I am still busy with making my second artist book this year “Cover Story”. I will let you know more about it, as soon as possible.

13.06.2011 I have currently finish writing a catalogue text for Jakob Anckarsvärd forthcoming publication. The text is a short introduction on some of the concepts related to collaboration and is especially looking at my own experience of working collaboratively on Transmission committee..

19.05.2011 A.S.A.P AT KONSTFACK’S DEGREE SHOW 2011
Through the two weeks of Konstfack’s yearly degree show, has A.S.A.P initiated two projects. One part is a withdrawal to the president of Konstfack’s office space. This is both an installation of two A.S.A.P displays, as well as two ‘detention’ meetings with invited speakers.

On Friday the 20th of May will Daniel Berg (aka Seriemord, http://seriemord.blogspot.com) talk. Daniel Berg is a PHD student in economy at Stockholms Universitet with a close interested in economy and environmental issues. The second conversation, will be with Tuula Kuosmanen on Friday the 27th May. Kuosmanen works as the director of Admission Department at the VHS (The Swedish Agency for Higher Education Services). She talked about the new application procedure and in more generally the work of VHS and Studera.nu.

A.S.A.P has will also through out the exhibition period be sending a series of postcards to the educational department of the government and on the opening will we make a manifestation. Finally: a public display of the project is on view in the main exhibition hall of Konstfack, the Vita Havet. Please click here for more information about A.S.A.P

14.05.2011 ***** Enlightenment Hearts, Cooking Compendium #1 -its a soup!**** is finally finished and can be viewed and downloaded from here This book contains recipes and essays selected by the Enlightenment Hearts crew. ENJOY!

22.04.2011, Students from the master groups exhibit their work from the course Artist Books.

I will, if I manage to get it all finished in time, show my artist book ‘Under Cover’ as part of this exhibition. I hope you can make it and that we can enjoy a glass of alcoholic substance together.
Öppettider: tis-tors 12-18, fre-sön 12-16
Datum och tid 26 april 2011 kl 16:00 – 3 maj 2011 kl 18:00
Plats och färdväg Grafiska Sällskapet, Hornsgatan 6, Stockholm

20.04.2011 A.S.A.P at Konsthall C Cetrifug UNFINISHED ANALOGIES (22.4 2011—8.5 2011)
A paper tape exhibition curated by Jacquelyn Davis (with the assistance of Christine Antaya) of valeveil: a Stockholm-based curatorial node. OPENING! 23.4 2011, 2-4 pm
Nothing changes from generation to generation except
the thing seen and that makes a composition.
- Gertrude Stein, “Composition as Explanation”

In light of Sweden’s recent decision to introduce tuition and application fees for incoming non-EU/EEA/Swiss students, highlighted artists, designers, activists and writers examine and respond to how these alterations affect the atmosphere of higher education―specifically, Sweden’s art schools and government-funded creative institutions. In the EU, policy changes which pertain to accessible education opportunities are being implemented. “Unfinished Analogies” hopes to provide an entry point into how these emergent laws alter the relationship between the art school, art student and international student. It is essential to evaluate governmental correlations

made between notions of quality and economic status, as well as to pinpoint the confusion between quantity and quality in relation to the culture industry.

The validity of an arts education and the methods that art schools employ deserve closer examination. Many questions arise when considering the international student’s changing role in Sweden’s art school setting, such as: When is it harmful to place collective identity above individual identity? Are collective responses to a current event more effective than separate, individual instances? When is a response to a current topic effective―when does it fall short? How does identity politics relate to art-making, and are homogeneity vs. heterogeneity linked to creativity? How will diversity change, given the reduced recruitment base for Swedish art schools? What does it mean to be educated, and is an individual’s arts education apparent when examining their creative evolution? How is talent cultivated in an art school environment―which art schools are successful at this and why? Are self-education/DIY alternatives viable for those unable to attend art school? What are the implications for Sweden as an ‘open society’?

A call-response exercise, contributors were given an opportunity to create new work as a response and/or critique, to provide solutions, navigational insight or perspectives. Works range in content and form: congruent work, winnerless games, critical texts, readings, media appropriation, rhetorical dissection, commentary and activism.

Art student is to art school as international student is to _____.

EU-student is to non-EU student as education is to _____.

Student is to education as art student is to _____.

Quality is to quantity as art is to _____.

Måndagen 18 april, kl 17.00, Konstfack (ingång Dialog gatan). Maria Lind presenterar numret, Brian Kuan Wood och Bernd Krauss talar och konstnärsgruppen ASAP presenterar ett aktuellt projekt som handlar om införandet av studieavgifter. Bar och DJ Adriana Seserin

Palettens nya nummer kretsar kring en rad frågor som rör konstens förhållande till samhället, till ekonomi, utbildning, konsumtion och ägande. Den amerikanska curatorn Christina Linden skriver om det intensifierade intresset för “social practice” inom konsten och diskuterar den kritik som ofta riktas mot sociala konstprojekt. Den brittiska aktionsgruppen Precarious Workers Brigade beskriver engagerat fjolårets demonstrationer i London mot höjningarna av högskolornas terminsavgifter. Konstnären Marysia Lewandowska och curatorn Laurel Ptak, båda verksamma i New York, medverkar med ett samtal som handlar om ägande och upphovsrätt.

Numret innehåller också fördjupade presentationer av flera enskilda konstnärskap. Den amerikanske forskaren Nico Vicario skriver om Malmökonstnären Viktor Rosdahl, Mats Stjernstedt presenterar den ukrainska konstnären Alevtina Kakidze och Cecilia Widenheim diskuterar den cypriotiske konstnären Christodoulos Panayiotous arbeten. New York-kritikern Laura Barlow analyserar den tyske konstnären Bernd Krauss handskrivna tidning Der Riecher och Malmöcuratorn Elena Tzotzi medverkar med en bred presentation av den koreanska konstnären Haegue Yangs installationer.

Paletten har ofta upplåtit sina sidor åt konstprojekt. Inbjudna konstnärer i detta nummer är Deb Sokolow (Chicago), som förutom fyra sidor i inlagan även står bakom omslaget, samt Karl Larsson, som i sin tur bjudit in Valentinas Klimasauskas (Vilnius).

Arrangemangen den 15 och 18 april då Brian Kuan Wood medverkar genomförs i samarbete med Iaspis. Arrangemangen i Göteborg genomförs med stöd av Göteborgs kulturnämnd och i samarbete med Hit. Arrangemanget på Konstfack genomförs i samarbete med konstnärsgruppen ASAP.
19.04.2011 kl 18–22 reading at Konsthall C together with MFK as part of their exhibition.
Närläsning av Do the Right Thing – en handbok från MFK med Ingrid Furre, Sofia Hultin, Maria Lind, Sean O’Connor, Pål Sommelius, Jens Strandberg, Kristoffer Svensk och Nathalie Wuerth från Konstfack. Öppet för 10 deltagare, först till kvarn, anmäl dig genom att skicka ett mail till: info.mfk@gmail.com senast 17 april. Du behöver inte ha läst boken innan för att delta.

A.S.A.P: TUTION FEES are here! watch out, soon we all have to pay!

Week 10 in Atelje 10 at konstfack.

Monday: 5pm until late —- Opening Party, Student movements moves As Soon As Possible! Protest dj´s & cheap beer 10 kr.

Tuesday: 10am Open doors: GRRR… Relax Recover Read React.
6pm Enlightenment Hearts, Soul, Soul & Sole, Reading Group, love is promised. Please click here for downloading the essay that will be read at the meeting and here for more details about Enlightenment Hearts. All welcome.

Wednesday: 10am Breakfast with Ivar, Rektor will straighten out question marks over a cup of coffee. “The Hard Way to Enlightenment” by: Stephan Dillemuth, popcorn, soda pops and hångel.

Thursday:10 am Wild Horses, Student lead course: A continuation of writing the course plan. 1pm Mejan visting, rector Måns Wrange and Mejan Students visiting to discuss the current situation, all welcome.

Friday: 1pm Make a sound! Remapping process with tea, good conversations and political radio… 3pm yourtube marathon. 5pm (we heard a rumor of a GDI party lets tag it).

Through out the week will we map a plan for how we can develop the work, there will also be a small library with related texts and a photo booth will be installed documenting the last international students at Konstfack.

and more will come!

02/05/2012 “Myt” By: Mats Rosengren , Published by: ?

28/04/2012 “Working Artists In The Greater Economy” By: Marina Vishmidt, Published in: LABOUR Issue #1 (2012)

28/04/2012 “Women’s Work, Artwork” By: Nina Power, Published in: LABOUR Issue #1 (2012)

17/04/2012 “Modernity Revisited” By: Jacques Rancière, Published in: www.backdoorbroadcasting.net (09/03/2012)

16/04/2012 “Vilse i pannkakan” By: Elin Klemetz, Published in: Filter #25 (2012)

12/04/2012 “Econ-aesthetics: A recent lecture” By: Marina Vishmidt, Published in: Agência (2011)

12/04/2012 “Human capital or toxic asset: after the wage, part1″ By: Marina Vishmidt, Published in: Reartikulacija #10, 11, 12, 13. (2010)

07/04/2012 “Nätjättarna vill veta allt om dig” By: Paul Frigyes, Published in: DN. (07/04/2012)

03/03/2012 “Bakom bokstäverna” By: Elise Karlsson, Published in: SvD. (03/03/2012)

02/03/2012 “The feminization of labor in cognitive capitalism” By: Cristina Morini, Published in: Feminist Review #87, Pp. 40-59. (2007)

28/02/2012 “General Performance” By: Sven Lütticken, Published in: E-flux journal #31. (01/2012)

27/01/2012 “The Paradoxes of Political Art” By: Jacques Rancière, Published in: Dissensus: on politics and aesthetics, Pp. 134-150. continuum International Publishing Group. (2010)

23/02/2012 “Säg nej till blodspengarna” By: Sinziana Ravini, Published in: Dagens Nyheter. (23/02/2012)

02/02/2012 “Stormakten som snart inte går att styra” By: Hans Ruin, Published in: Dagens Nyheter. (02/02/2012)

28/01/2012 “Poland Signs Copyright Treaty That Drew Protests” By: VANESSA GERA (AP), Published in: Associated Press, WARSAW, Poland (26/01/2012)

20/01/2012 “‘Genesis and Structure’ and Phenomenology” By: Jacques Derrida, Published in: Writing and Difference, translated by: Alan Bass. pp. 193-211. Routledge Classics. 2004 (org. published 1978)

25/01/2012 “När Facebook enade folket i Egypten” By: Wael Ghonim, Published in: Dagens Nyheter (24/01/2012)

20/01/2012 “A Cosmopolitical Proposal” By: Isabelle Stengers, Published in: Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, edit by: Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, eds. Pp. 994-1003. Cambdridge: MIT Press. (2005)

19/01/2012 “Lecture by: Isabelle Stengers and Donna Haraway at The Whitehead Research Project” Published (02/12/2010)

14/01/2012 “Vi behöver en ny kapitalism som är mer ansvarstagande” By: Klas Eklund Published by: Dagens Nyheter. (14/01/2012)

04/01/2012 “Reflection on a Relational Self” By: Jenny Strandberg Published in: Self Published (Fall/2011)

03/01/2012 “Historiens dom över Sverige blir hård” By: Kerstin Lundell Published in: Dagens Nyheter (03/01/2012)

16/05/2012 – “Letter Refused” in F.A.Q. Konstfack School paper 16 may at 3.30 pm – 8 pm.

F.A.Q., nummer 1
tedF.A.Q. är studenterna på Konstfacks skoltidning och en plattform för nya illustratörer, formgivare och konstnärer.

Temat för det första numret är kollektiva processer och vi förkovrar oss både teoretiskt och praktiskt i hur man arbetar kollektivt och vad det innebär. Bland annat undrar Karin Hagen om det går att arbeta kollektivt som illustratör, Sam Kennedy presenterar Konstfacks inredning ur ett nytt perspektiv och vi gör en arkeologisk undersökning av platser på Konstfack med illustration som verktyg.
Dessutom: Poesi! Essäer! Margaret Thatcher! Konst!”

16-27/05/2012 – An Anti-Progress Report at Konstfack Vårutställning Se det senaste inom konst, design och konsthantverk – Konstfacks vårutställningar. Nyutexaminerade kandidat- och masterstudenter; konstnärer, designers, konsthantverkare och bildpedagoger visar upp sina examensverk.

13/04/2012 – The Hills as a method in Erosion magazine Release of the publication 4pm – 12am Friday 13th 2012 Teater Tribunalen Hornsgatan 92 Stockholm Subway station: Zinkensdamm

Available as tabloid paper (70 SEK) and pdf (free download) here
Check Hostel Gallery here: http://hostelgallery.com/

17/03- 06/05/2012 – The Hills at Gävle Konstcentrum Studenter från Konstfacks magisterprogram Art in the Public Realm har skapat förslag för nytänkande kring den offentliga konsten i Gävle. Verk i form av performance, skulptur, film och annat presenteras. Samarbete mellan Gävle Konstcentrum och Konstfack.

Hej Gävle
Konstfack ger förslag på offentliga konstverk i staden
17/3 – 6/5 2012
Johanna Adebäck, Nicola Bergström Hansen, Pavel Fiorentino, Carl Fredrik Hellström, Sofia Hultin, Ingela Ihrman, Viktoria Kindstrand, Anne-Liis Kogan, Sanna Marander, Bobi Prinz, The Hills, Pål Sommelius och Erla Silfa Thorgrimsdottír.

Gävle har en unik position vad det gäller offentlig konst i Sverige. I få städer av Gävles storlek har så många offentliga konstverk uppförts, och flertalet har blivit uppmärksammade långt utanför stadens gränser. Den som tar sig runt Gävle, till de öppna platserna och de kommunala byggnaderna, kan uppleva verk av Sveriges mest intressanta konstnärer.

Konstfacks masterutbildning Konst i offentligheten är unik i norra Europa med sin betoning på konstens plats och funktioner i offentligheten. “Offentlighet” har varit ett viktigt begrepp för uppbyggnaden av den demokratiska välfärdsstat som i Sverige har kallats Folkhemmet, och är idag ett minst lika viktigt begrepp med tanke de svenska stadskärnornas nya utformning där tidigare offentliga platser, såsom torg förvandlats till privatägda gallerior. Dessutom den ständigt pågående diskussionen om offentlighetsprinciper, immateriella rättigheter samt inte minst privatiseringen av vård, omsorg och infrastruktur (såsom järnvägen). Även de offentliga kulturinstitutionerna har fått allt högre krav på samfinansiering och kan möjligen inte räkna med samma samhälleliga stöd som tidigare.

Masterstudentgruppen undersöker en rad aspekter av den offentlighet som utspelar sig både i de fysiska och virtuella rummen. Offentlighet inbegriper inte bara stadsrummen och institutionerna utan också till exempel frågor som gäller historieskrivningen och dess dominerande och marginaliserade berättelser, det offentliga samtalet, mediaberättelserna och den “den allmänna opinionen”.

Samarbetet mellan Konstfack och Gävle Konstcentrum byggde på en gemensam önskan om att tänka fritt och experimentellt om vad ett offentligt konstverk kan vara. Båda institutionerna hade något att lära av varandra. Kanske behöver inte ett offentligt verk nödvändigtvis vara ett slittåligt objekt i stadsrummet? Kan också ett offentligt verk gripa in i vardagen på ett mer subtilt sätt? Kan det tydligt interagera med enskilda människor och utgå ifrån, eller upphov till, sociala relationer? Kan det offentliga verket fokusera på framtiden, vara tillfälligt eller förändras över tiden? Kan det också gå in och verka i de strukturer som distribuerar kunskap och berättelser? Kan det sätta igång processer, få oss att se vår vardag på ett annat sätt eller till och med få oss att föreställa oss en annan ordning?

Vilken fråga som än bildar utgångspunkten så undkommer ingen konstnär som skapar ett offentligt verk frågan om hur just detta verk är placerat på platsen, och hur verket återverkar på och tolkas i den lokala situation det befinner sig i. Här finns också en gräns för konstnärens påverkan och kontroll, en gräns som ibland kan te sig brutal. Ett verk i offentligheten kommer att leva sitt eget liv. Det kommer att dra på sig olika tolkningar och känslor såsom glädje eller förargelse, eller helt enkelt nonchaleras. Det kommer att existera i människors vardag och uppleva med- och motgångar. Det kommer att förändras med tiden, inte bara fysiskt utan också i de ackumulerade föreställningar och uppfattningar som bygger sin egen föränderliga historia. Det kommer att ge upphov till berättelser, små ritualer, bli en del av platsens identitet eller sakta erodera och försvinna, om inte fysiskt så åtminstone ur människors medvetanden. Det är inte heller givet att konstverket eftersträvar ett långt liv, det kan lika gärna upprätta en mycket speciell situation i en viss tid.

Samarbetet mellan Konstfack och Gävle Konstcentrum har haft god tid på sig att utvecklas. Hösten 2010 besökte Gävle Konstcentrum Konstfack för att ta del av studenternas praktik och förmedla det arbete som utförts i kommunen med den offentliga konsten och alla dess komplicerade moment av förhandling och samarbete. Under våren och hösten 2011 reste Konstfacksstudenter upprepade gånger till Gävle, enskilt och i grupp. Konstcentrum ordnade möten och visade till platser och byggnader runt om i staden. Studenterna fortsatte att på egen hand följa upp, söka upp nya platser och knyta egna kontakter i Gävle. Studenternas förslag på framtida verk för Gävle kom att bilda ett spektrum av förhållningssätt och praktiker: relationella verk, skulpturer, händelser, ljud, performance, text och video.

Det som visas i denna utställning är förslag och modeller. Men vad konsthistorien visar är att varje enskilt verk – öppet eller dolt – innehåller en instruktion eller en uppmaning till skapande. Gränsen mellan en modell, eller en process, och ett ”färdigt” verk är oftast diffus och därför kan också flera av dessa modeller och installationer i utställningsrummet ses som verk i sin egen rätt.

Vi vill speciellt tacka GDJ-fonden, Eva Österberg, konstnär, Eileen Thormodsen och Örjan Hans-Ers från Gävle symfoniorkester, Desiree Kjellberg och Joe Hillgården, Ulf Ivar Nilson, författare, Mikael Berglund på Gasklockorna, Skottes Musikteater, Tina Lindberg på Kulturkiosken och IDKA, Cristian Jansson, parkingenjör Gävle kommun/Valls hage och Lars–Göran Ståhl från Kultur & Fritidsnämnden

Text av: Magnus Bärtås, professor, Konstfack
Anna Livion-Ingvarsson, Chef, Gävle Konstcentrum

09-11/02/2012 – Fortsättningsinstitutet: klippet and
“The empty room of speculation”

I am currently working with a project together with Fortsättnings Institutet that will result in a workshop and presentation at Platform and Tensta Konsthall early next year read more about the project here: http://www.theinstituteofcontinuation.org/welcome

This project is a collaboration with Zoe Poluch and is called “The empty room of speculation” it is a panel discussion set in year 2112 about the history of self-organised learning. This game is a private setting but will hopefully be remade for a public presentation of some kind.

“The empty room of speculation”

We hereby invite you all to a symposium that looks back at the 21th century’s ‘Self-organized learning’ movement in art, theory and education. With recent major museum exhibitions that revisit the turn of the century’s “educational turn” we now ask ourselves, decades later, where did all this knowledge production get us? What did these inititives lead towards, what was actually learnt, and what can we learn from it now in 2112?

It has become clear that the discourse surrounding this period in history has become dense enough to demand critical reconsideration. This one-day symposium will explore the beginning and end of certain initiatives as a basis for a critical reconsideration of movements such as The Institute of Continuation, Prekariatet, The Haircut Before the Party, and other artistic pratices that were working around this topic during this period. The conference will also revisit other historical movements such as the Copenhagen Free University, Occupy Wall Street, and EuroMayDay.

You are kindly asked to prepare a brief presentation approx. 10-15 minutes long that foregrounds and critically engages with this historical period of the 21st century as an essential strategy for uncovering blind spots in the discourse and exploring ways in which it can be redirected, revised, and if necessary, overturned.

When: February 10th, 2112
Where: The Institute of Continuation, Platform, Stockholm
Costume: optional but futuristic is appreciated.

Inspirerade av det senaste årets protest- och motståndsrörelser runt om i världen bjuder Fortsättningsinstitutet in allmänheten att testa och utforska alternativa platformar för lärande. På Fortsättningsinstitutet kan idéer, personliga upplevelser och oro för den rådande samhällssituationen delas, förstås djupare och bli startskottet för handling. Diskussionsforumet Klippet som tar plats under en dag på Tensta Konsthall har formen av en frisörsalong där salongen blir en mötesplats och samtidigt skapar en direkt förändring. Klippet bjuder in allmänheten att få en gratis klippning med möjligheten att uttrycka sina tankar och erfarenheter om rådande samhällssituationer, traditionella utbildningssystem samt konstinstitutionens möjliga roll inom dessa områden. Unga konstnärer, aktivister och curatorer bidrar till att Klippet ska bli en icke-hierarkisk plats för kunskapsutbyte genom att arbeta med den fysiska platsens utformning. Deltagarna inkluderar bland andra Emanuel Almborg, Jens Strandberg, The Hair Cut Before The Party (Richard Houguez och Lewis Bassett), curatorerna Katrin Ingelstedt och Egle Kulbokaite.

Fortsättningsinstitutet är en plats för lärande av och med konstnären. Varannan måndagseftermiddag existerar Fortsättningsinstitutet på Plattform Stockholm i Liljeholmen som en plats för samtal mellan unga konstnärer som har ett intresse av att lära sig mer och dela med sig av sin kunskap inom samtidskonstområdet. Ämnen som uppkommer i samtalen blir då och då till performances, samtal eller utställningar på olika plaster i Stockholm

06/02/2012 – Cover story act II at Konstfack A10.

Tomas Chaffe
Carl Johan Rosen
Rich Hall
Tove Eklund Lindskog
HOW TO AFFORD A MACBOOK
Lindsay Sekulowicz
Nina Stuhldreher
Céline Condorelli
Bernd Krauss
Samuel Dowd
Francis Mckee
Stephan Dillemuth
Victoria Skogsberg
Laura Aldridge
Lynn Hynd
Yvonne Mullock
Grier Edmundson
Anthony Schrag
Ciara Phillips
Klaus Weber
Pål Bylund
Zeynep Arman
Hirofumi Suda
Luke Barker
Kristina Bengtsson
Nicola Bergstrom Hansen
Robin Bhattacharya
Ruth Buchanan & Rachel Koolen
Justin Carter
Andrea Creutz
Nic Green
Inga Zimprich
Marla Hansen
Staffan Hjalmarsson
Mette Juul
Erich Koller
Adam Macchia
Ralo Mayer/Manoa free university
Pål Sommelius
Maryam Fanni
Sofia Hultin
Pavel Fiorentino
Kristoffer Svenberg
Marysia Lewandowska
Magnus Bartas
Ingrid Furre
Michele Masucci

The different parts of Overhead and Behind are examined in series of episodes and an ongoing glossary that expands words connected to the learning exercise. The purpose of Overhead and Behind is (a) to see how structures over-ones-head conceals value systems which conforms working conditions and (b) to practice the method of “being behind”, i.e. to slow-down and counterpose progress. The third aim (c) is to see how these standpoints can be practiced and how this act can insert a new valorization-system.

It is making use of three models for doing this, this website, which unfolds episodes in the making of them, The Hills and Enlightenment Hearts. Under Relevance you find a reading and watching list for the work and under Links bodies/people/places/friends/networks that all have assisted the making of the work.

The episodes displayed on this website are often in collaboration with other people.

For more information jensstrandberg[at]1200m.org.

Remember to always be behind

At the moment we continue “writing the course plan”. This is done simply by hosting events once a week for the other individuals in the course.

Lesson 3:
10 March 2011 we did a workshop in musical writing. Each participator in the course were given a questions that needed to be answered by a song. These answers were followed by a short discussion, on why they picked the song and from this discussion together wrote a speech.

PLAYLIST:

1) What are “we”?
answer: We are the champions Queens
Human The Killers
The idiot bastard son Frank Zappa

2) What is it to be a student?
answer: We don´t need no education Pink Floyd
The book I read Talkingheads

3) What is the point of our course?
answer: We don´t need no education Pink Floyd
Double trouble Half Japanese
What is the ugliest part of your body Frank Zappa

4) Why make art?
answer: Heal the world Michael Jacksson
Jaques Derrida Scritti Politti
Concentration moon Frank Zappa

One of us picked the song life/Universe by Dektetivbyran to answered all questions

LYRICS FOR A MOTION

How to start, the best thing is perhaps just to begin. To draw a straights line, a perfect line where everything makes sense. Perhaps it is best to draw it within the frame but the frame needs to be flexible. Never fixed, always in flux. It needs to be a frame for a straight line, not the other way around, that would be bizarre. It would be like the ugliest part of your body, I mean not you nose or toe, just your mind.

We are the privilege people waiting for a revolution from above, and, at the same time we are victims of a system beyond our control, forced to search for questions or at least for happiness in the land of freedom.

Is freedom our privilege or are products for a privileged guilt? to keep us calm, everything will be ok! Allow our self deception process to conserve our concentration moon and conscious reflection. Make the world into a better place for you and for me or should we politely ignore it and move on.

It can be hard is finding the unpredictable and improvising the essentials of the everyday life. Are we only in it for the money, or self satisfaction? Most likely “we” are not here to earn it, just to spend it, as a way of questioning the question of the question. A mixture of differences like the group of artists.

Lets eat the cake of Marie Antoinette or at least a slice of it. To avoid getting into too much of a mess, to find heterogeneity. We are still running free as a group of wild horses. The absence of one will not affect the result, it will only reframe the present frame, still as a group.

Bring us the desert and we will share it with you allowing you also to have a slice. In fact cakes are meant to be shared by everyone, thats the sweetness of it and also the fundament of our group.

Together we choose to be champions but for a different reasons and in different ways. One for the privilege and one for the guilt. Either way we are not sitting in front of a dictator, teacher leave us kids alone.

We answer questions and find questions as the answers and the conclusion can be: are we humans or are we dancers or are we just “we”.

We will sum it up like this:

Final music (Dektetivbyran, life/Universe

Lesson 2:
3 March 2011Bobi Prinz hosting the second Wild Horses lesson. More information about this will be uploaded as soon as we possible.

Lesson 1:
18 February 2011Ingrid Furre hosting the first Wild Horses lesson:

and

Initial meeting:
11 February 2011 this meeting was a discussion attended by 6 people on how to begin the course. Ingrid Furre was asked to host the first course plan writing session. This would form the lesson one in how to make a student led course.

WE in Transmission is a short text written for Jakob Anckarsvärd as part of his artist book “10 years with Transmission Gallery”. The book can be bought from Jakob’s website: http://jakobanckarsvard.com/ Transmission Gallery is an artist run, members gallery in Glasgow that has existed since 1983. I served as a committee member between 2008-2010. This book was produced upon Jakob’s 10 year anniversary for taking part in Transmission’s annual members show. For more information about Transmission visit: http://www.transmissiongallery.org/

WE in TRANSMISSION

It happened to be this week of intellectual superstars visiting Stockholm the day Jakob got in touch with me. I had never met Jakob prior to our café latte date at a small café in a suburb of Stockholm, but it was sunny and Jakob brought his two sleeping kids. A mutual friend had passed my e-mail on to Jakob as she thought we would have connecting ideas about how art should be. We had both lived in Glasgow, although at separate times and we are both interested in self-organization and alternative models of working. Now we were both based in the “Capital of Scandinavia”, as it self-proclaimed likes to be entitled.

The schedule of Stockholm-intellectual-superstar-lectures was packed this week. First out was Wendy Brown who talked about the burqa and politics of tolerance. On Wednesday it was time to hear an old associate from when I was living in Glasgow; Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt who talked about privatization of the Scottish grant system and later in the evening Judith Butler. The week was topped off with a talk by Sarah Ahmed on Friday night and a three hours long presentation by Mark Fisher on Sunday evening, breathtaking. The reason why I felt compelled to include this hectic schedule of mine in this short text is not to sell you the concept of Stockholm as a great intellectual core. Trust me we are normally not granted with this kind of activities. Instead this was the week where for the first time since I moved to Stockholm I felt that people started to talk and connect with each other. The same people attended almost all of the lectures and discussions began out of our curiosity for newly found food for thoughts. I don’t know if this micro community will develop or be forgotten in the future but when Jacob asked me to write a short text for his forthcoming anniversary catalogue for Transmission Gallery’s membership exhibition, the need to say ‘yes’ was obvious. The past week had re-sparked ideas of collaboration that reminded me of my time in Glasgow.

All art works by: Jakob Anckarsvärd.

Transmission is a members based artist run gallery in Glasgow which I dedicated my full attention to between 2008-2010. It has existed since 1983 and has a committee that programmes and runs the gallery. I stumble with almost impossibility to write about Transmission without also writing about collaboration and fluctuating organizational structures, which is tightly interwoven with my own experience of running the gallery. Each committee member devotes two years of their free time to organize the gallery activities, most of the time as a footnote to their money-making job and/or studio practice. Once their two years are up, they are kindly asked to leave space for a new committee member, creating a continuous rotation of people and ideas. The purpose and consequence of having a rolling committee structure is that the gallery shifts in character and interest.

The main task of the committee is to serve the interest of the members, which approximately, when writing this text, measures 300¹. This, one should say, has been interpreted differently through Transmission’s brief history. However, the important idea connected to this is that the members can at the gallery’s annual general meeting (AGM), not approve the nomination of the sitting committee. Making the gallery run, at least theoretically, by its members. The significant concept underlying this model is that it shifts the focus away from the artists that shows in the gallery and maybe also away from the committee that runs everyday business of the gallery towards the members that ultimately is the gallery. In the same way this text attempts to shift the attention away from the consumption of art to the context for art.

Let’s begin with one of the few things that has remained the same throughout the history of Transmission, the name. The verb of ‘transmission’ is ‘transmit’, which is to cause something to pass from one place or person to another, or the act of sharing or communicating something. In exhibition contexts the act of transmitting is crucial, an artwork does not exist unless it is shared. In presenting Transmission gallery this is often the starting point for the discussion, but I hope to present a slightly different angle. I will discuss Transmission not only as a place for presenting art but also a place for creating social networks. Irit Rogoff quotes Jean-Luc Nancy in the essay ‘WE-Collectivities, Mutualities, Participations’: “’There is no meaning if meaning is not shared,’… I would want to say that we are staging the possibility of a politics without a plan”. Elysa Lozano expands this in her text ‘Project Space Survival Strategies and the Future of the Art Economy’ in which she states: “Work presented publicly creates a sphere where the audience collectively produces their meaning and thus participates in a political activity”² This arguably moves our concern away from the art presented to the creation of social communities. I will try to return to this later in the text, but please allow it to echo when reading the following passages.

One should also say that the image of how Transmission runs is more complex than what I will draw out here, as it includes the funding of the gallery, the gallery’s relationship to the city and the marketing of the city etc. However I am leaving these aspects to other people to develop, as I am more keen to focus on Transmission’s role in creating a community. I am also not going into distinguishing terms applied when talking about community and collaboration. There is a jungle of terminologies connected to these notions, which other people has successfully problematized and straightened out. I will just briefly say that in this text I will mainly make use of the term ‘collaboration’ which refers to the process wherein people ‘work together’- applying both the work of individuals as of larger collectives. ‘Collaboration’ suggests an open-ended method and concept, compared to ‘cooperation’, which underlines working together and benefitting from it. I will also talk about ‘working together’, as this focuses on ‘work’ and being in a group and lastly ‘coming together’, which shifts the focus away from work to more social forms.

Transmission gallery committee is a jumbled combination of 4-6 people that most of the time has no idea of how one runs a gallery, curates exhibitions, organizes accounts and writes funding applications, many times do they not know each other prior to getting involved with the gallery. The committee is a group of amateurs that learn through doing and does things ‘wrong’. One should of course question what is considered right and wrong, in many ways I would say that what makes the gallery interesting is this unintentional questioning of pre-established notions. In my experience of working in Transmission, this disorder is important for contesting the ruling order of presenting art.
The sitting committee nominates the new committee and, when I was there, we always tried to think of people outside of our realm of friends in order to expand the diversity of the interests on the committee. This way of coming together and later working together is what makes the gallery interesting.

Compared to companies there is no pressure that Transmission should financially profit from the exhibitions and the committee has fairly free hands to run the gallery in whatever way they want. This makes the gallery a flat, or at least a flatter, structure for working together. Ideas are presented by the committee as a cohesive decision. This does not mean that the committee always agrees but it was never a point, in my experience, where we materialized a decision without us all understanding its implications and reaching what Chantal Mouffe calls a ‘conflictual consensus’. According to Maria Lind, Mouffe’s concept of agonism is “to struggle with an adversary rather than an enemy, as in antagonism”³. In ‘Articulated Power Relations’ -a conversation between Markus Miessen and Chantal Mouffe, Mouffe distinguishes the understanding of ‘enemies’ and ‘adversaries’ in the following way: “The major difference between enemies and adversaries is that adversaries are, so to speak, ‘friendly enemies’ in the sense that they have got something in common: they share a symbolic space. Therefore there can exist between them what I call a conflictual consensus. They agree on the ethico-political principles that inform the political association but they disagree about the interpretation of those principles”⁴. Following the model suggested by Mouffe, one should aim for embracing difference and disagreements. This allows one to move away from the risk of ‘consensus of the centre’, which European-politics so optimistically has welcomed in recent years. The ‘consensus of the centre’ is in many ways one of the biggest threats to democracy as it arguably enables right-wing extremists to act as the only alternative on the political arena⁵. Working together, with no particular leader, allows for the possibility to re-shape and re-imagine the roles in a group at any given point, as positions can and should fluctuate between people. However one shouldn’t neglect the invisible working structures that often underlines these constellations and it is important to actively try to speak about and refuse these structures.

There is no secret, collaboration requires communication, preferably good communication. To transmit and share a language, to understand and even translate, sometimes in consensus and sometimes in conflictual consensus, as outlined earlier. Collaboration is, in this sense, a way to transmit ideas (presenting artists and art works in the gallery) but more importantly a way to entice discussions and communication among the visitors around these works.

There is a possibility to re-read transmission, not as a place of viewing art but as a space for discussion, both within the committee as outside of the committee. To define Transmission in this way attempts to say that a small group (the committee) wants through conflictual consensus mobilize larger groups (the members), in order to create community.

At the moment social networks are more established than ever. On the Internet one can find numerous amounts of self-organized social networks. Compared to Transmission are these communities often also self-supported and can exist globally. They are sometimes so globally expanded and large in their size that we don’t even consider them to be self-organized anymore. In these networks is the working together more complex than ever, it is often generated by the users without them even reflecting on it. The online collaborative encyclopedia Wikipedia is one example of this. Wikipedia is a free non-profit web based encyclopedia that can be edited and altered by anyone who can afford a computer. In many ways Wikipedia is questioning the very notion of knowledge and our definition of defining, as it keeps itself editable. This frame allows terminologies, notions and concepts to change, as an undefined net-community re-edits and re-thinks concepts. This is information in its purest sense, as it, similar to all communities, keeps on being in-formation. Wikipedia defines a community as “a group of interacting people living in a common location”. It later continues “…the word is often used to refer to a group that is organized around common values and is attributed with social cohesion within a shared geographical location…”. Compared to the Internet networks is this definition of a community additionally focusing on a group sharing a geographical location.

While Transmission changes, both within the committee but also its members, it remains being located in Trongate, Glasgow. It also remains as a members based organization. This is also why Transmission annual members show is the solid rock that keeps reoccurring, in what otherwise seems like a constant flux. No matter who runs the gallery, the member’s show reoccurs, as the last show before the summer break, as one of the most important exhibitions in Glasgow. It is the exhibition where the gallery members come together to collectively exhibit in the gallery. It is also the departure and destination of this catalogue.

This exhibition invites all members to submit one piece of artwork to a group show that normally comprises more than 100 artists and art works. Although it looks hectic in its formal presentation and does not do justice to many of the displayed works, the exhibition is one of the most important for the gallery. From experience I know it can be hard to get around to the different studios and see artists’ art work. It can also prove difficult to see exhibitions, when one spends so much time planning for Transmission (in fact, seeing art can be the last thing one wants to do). Therefore the member’s show is an important exhibition to meet and see what people has been up to throughout the year. In many cases, when I was on the committee, an artist’s contribution to the members show was the initial point for later getting in touch with them and begin discussions about a potential exhibition. It is also an exhibition where the committee, newly graduated and internationally celebrated artists exhibit along side each other, in no hierarchical order. In this way relations between artists, that perhaps would have never met, are established.

While the role of the committee is to work together, the role of Transmission, and especially the members show, is the gathering of ‘coming together’. Coming together is, I think, even more valuable than working together, as it is the step before collaboration. It is the potential for anything, which is what makes it exciting. So while the members show is one of the busiest exhibitions in its formal presentation, it is also one of the busiest gatherings for Glasgow art community. It is the time when one hangs out and enjoys a beer together. It is also the time when one gets introduced to new people, extending and strengthening a network. I say it again, the member’s show is important for the gallery, but also for the members. Hence I am never surprised when finding the different years member show listed on artist’s CV. Although coming together is not collaboration per se, I would argue that this social activity forms the basis for artists to begin collaborating. It is coming together for potentially working together. It is a place where a circle of friends are re-shaped and re-imagined and new social communities are created.

My and Jacob’s café latte date is a micro example of getting together similar to the one of Transmission members show opening. We enjoy a beverage (the beer at the opening) and talk about our work. The meeting was made possible through an extended realm of friends, that imagined we would share an interest in alternative models for transmitting art. Models that can exist outside of the common commercial realm of presenting and selling art. This model of exhibition practice is often communally imagined, communicated and translated. It’s a creation of social networks that does not necessary follow the pre-existing paths when presenting art, but instead remain plural and full of potential directions. It’s not a cooperation which works towards a goal, rather I would say, this is a collaboration where a group of people work together without an end, as an aspiration of learning together and producing meaning that can be shared and contested in groups and new social constellations.

Problems remain; does it make any difference to collaborate? Does it produce a better result? Or how does one sustain these collaborations? I will not be able to disclose them here, but collaborations does not need to exist forever. Collaborations can be temporal, fluctuating and it is often even good if they are. So are collaborations important? Of course, as collaborations are communal, plural, political and contains all potential ingredients to shape an alternative to existing structures. Collaboration has the potential to create communities, macro and micro, and these communities can create new constellations making what seems impossible, possible.

Jens Strandberg, June 2011

1. Transmission has some members outside of UK, however the majority of the members are based in or around Glasgow.
2. Elysa Lozano, Project Space Survival Strategies and the Future of the Art Economy, published in ‘ak28 revisited and three parallel visions’, Mount Analogue, 2011. As a footnote to the footnote: ak28 was a self-organized and self-funded artist run gallery in Stockholm, between 2003-2009.
3. Maria Lind, “The Collaborative Turn”
4. http://roundtable.kein.org/node/545
5. Maria Lind, pinpoints this argument from Mouffe in her essay “The Collaborative Turn”.

“The anecdote of success” should be presented live and this performance is made particularly for video documenting the project.

Hmm…. I want to begin by saying that this is a homage to the writer Jill Johnstons who passed away a couple of days ago at age of 81. Therefore I would like to start by having a minute of silence.

The title of this episode is: New Approach: performer/audience/mirrorball, a reflection on my practice at beginning of Konstfack.

This is a punctuation in Helvetica.

This is the end, the final symbol of my paragraph, the punctuation of the sentence, the full stop, the end, the end of the end, the void, the conclusion and full expression for what has been done. That is this is the end but not as the end, but as objective representation of the end, the dot on the map, the Malevich black square on white, the mustache on the dictator, the mark on the ground which indicates where the performer should stand, the end and the beginning. This is the end, but not because I am necessary look for it, but the end as what soon to come.

So I hope you dont mind that I will begin with the end, cause it means nothing, everything and of course whatever, but as the specific whatever. Whatever; not as in whatever it does not matter, but whatever as in “it always matters”, the multiples whatever insofar as it is ‘whatever singularity’. The whatever in the singular; one, true, good and perfect, whatever. The one truth good perfect whatever tender, red, grouse, big or lame. So allow me welcome “whatever” in this specific whatever frame, that is, whatever frame we choose. Or nowadays more commonly whatever frame we are given. But what is whatever frame that I am struggling to reveal?

Allow me a detour:

In Wim Wender’s movie “The American Friend” is Bruno Ganz playing the character Jonathan Zimmermann a peaceful frame maker with a supportive family, but who unfortunately carries a fatal decease. Tom Ripley played by Denis Hopper, has an deal with an art forger, to sell the forger’s paintings in Germany to high price. Zimmermann who is a good framer, studies paintings in great detail and can tell that the painting is forged, the blue is not right. As the drama unfolds is Zimmermann ending up as a hit-man, killing many people. 
I should maybe not say more about movie in case you want to see this. 
However one of my favorite scenes is when Zimmermann frustratingly smashes up a frame in his office. This metaphorical image the framer, smashing up the frame is a beautiful representation of my practice.

Yep Yep, the framer is the professional person who constructs the frame for the artwork. Most artists will aim to have a frame no one thinks of when viewing the work. One of the more common frame in museums and institutions, I have used this myself once, is the black wooden frame,. This frame is the indicator of nothing, it signifies: I am neutral, I dont exist, “I am not here”, I am classy, dont look at me, I am bold and I am in contrast to the wall.

In a letter to an institution a friend of mine ones wrote; the frame is always stronger than its content. The frame is always what determines the content and one have to consider this when creating the image. Our constructed situation is the boarder It is a total of six minutes and digital slide projection of static images of my choice.

But what is the point of the frame when the frame is bolder than the image? I do not know but I should definitely get to my point. It is after all, time for a resolution, I will resign myself to want this, progress, result, shape, form, product.

I want this because of the struggling artist in me, 
I want this because of the ugly capitalist in me, 
I want this because of the punker in me, 
I want this because of the fake academic in me,
or with other words;

I want this because of the specific whatever in me, 
I want this because of the liberated worker in me, 
I want this because money and time does matter, 
I want this because I learned that one should want this,
I learned to learn that one should want a desire, direction and targets, 
I learned that this desire should be directed to an end and I learned that with a lack of imagination one can start with an end.
Because ‘why should anyone notice the shape of a watch at the moment of looking at the time?’ and this is my time here and it is quickly coming to an end. We the workers will soon leave the factory, or more literally the former factory. But before leaving the factory I will reflect on the mirrored image. The disfigured reflection of the mirrorball. The large mirrorball at center of the dance hall. The non-linear line of our structure, my romantic attempt to bend the expression mark to a question mark. My desire to not describe whatever I see, but welcoming a scattered image to circulates the dance floor. The audience as the performer and the fragments as the coalition.
As Socrates famously announced 400 years before Christ: “I know that I know nothing”. A painful wisdom for most of us. But what is the point of not understanding? Anthony Huberman exhibition article for “Blind man in Dark Room Looking for Black Cat That’s Not There”, “ celebrates non-knowledge or a “productive confusion” as a hole punched logic.

Zero should not lead to one and one should not lead to two, it should simply fragment with intuition and non-logic. One should aim to decontextualize and split the zero, bracket the situation, pull content into a new frame, allow the virtual to become the actual and at the same time the actual to become the virtual; image the frame, change the truth and abstract the construction.

Sorry yes, no, maybe and credit rolls of the movie, I hate the credit rolls, it does not matter what movie or if it was a happy end or not. The problem is that it is the end, all hope is gone.

When beginning everything was hopeful and fresh. Whatever can happen and whatever feels….

A transcript for a talk given at Konstfack December 2010 as well as IASPIS, “work work work” workshop December 2010.

The lecture takes place in a lecture hall at Konstfack.
It begins when everyone is seated.
Lights goes off, the space is black.
Half Japanese song Poetic License plays loud in the dark space.

This is a song by Half Japanese. Hmm… In the film “Half Japanese: The Band That Would Be King”, explains the two brothers Dave and Jad Fair, co-funders of the band, their views on how to play the guitar.

“…it seems like it is pretty easy to play the guitar, because once you know…  …that the high notes, the little skinny ones makes high sounds and the big fat ones make low sounds. And if you go to the part of the guitar where you pluck it, that makes high sounds and down the other end… than you got a master… thats all you got to know…” and he continues “…if you want it to be fast, play fast and if you want to go slow, play slow. Thats all there is to it, its that easy to play the guitar…”
At the core of the statement is the question, what is it to master an instrument?

As I do not feel like I am equipped with the necessary knowledge to grasp concepts around production within society at large, I figured it would be best to start by examining the concept from within my own artistic practice. A practice which in part is about trying to investigate the process of “production” and what it means to be productive. Productive in the traditional sense of the word, i.e. in producing a commodity or producing a result. It is within this constant struggle between fulfilling oneself, and questioning that feeling or that process, that this part of my practice lies.

Besides the example of Half Japanese, one of the first things that came to my mind was to introduce an ongoing project I initiated about two years ago, entitled “Coming soon”. This collaborative project between myself and another artist, aimed to never be realized, but to always appear on the verge of coming soon. Taking the frame of a motion picture, “Coming soon”, intends to interrogate the plasticity of time and the politics associated with reaching an end and a resolution. Because why do we want to reach an end? what is our investment in the production? in new knowledge, in the new thinking? knowledge as product, product as thinking, thinking as the production, thinking with an end, productive thinking?
New beginning… Condition number two.

In september this year I began studying at Konstfack, an arts and craft school in the suburbs of Stockholm. The premises of Konstfack is the former factory of the telecom company Ericsson. Built in the 1940’s, the building functioned as a factory for Ericsson until 2003, when the company decided to move on and leave the building. The building was redesigned when it was turned into an art school. Ironically within this redesign much of the former hierarchical structures between manager and workers remained unchanged. For example one can, in traditional panopticon style, from most offices in the different design departments, gaze down onto the students workspace. However that is if you get passed the electronic door tag system. A small circular plastic key, which allows the students and staff to access certain parts of college. A system designed to control that no unwanted visitors access the building, but to see who is in and where they are working.

Looking into this position one have to ask oneself, are students students, or are students factory workers? Is the motion picture allowing us to come or leave? Again what are the conditions for production and who am I producing for?

Conditions within the factory remain standardised however the workers on the production line have changed. Knowledge has become the new product and this product is evaluated before leaving the factory. Programmes are designed to give a set input for all involved workers. Thinking is reduced to thinking with an aim. Allowing companies to pump capital into training, to cheaply develop new product, useful labor or new useful capital. As Tony Blair said “Education is the best political economy we have’. So the factory is the site production and although we are not quite there yet, we can suspect that it will only be a matter of time before the school introduces tuition fees for everyone. This is the case in most european countries and especially the schools in britain, where I have been educated prior to stockholm.

After all, Konstfack did earlier this year launch their tuition fee of 265.000 swedish crowns per year for non-eu residents. This does of course not include the “small” application fee of 900 crowns. This is obviously part of larger governmental scheme, but remains as a fact which will have a large affect on the diversity and mixtures of class, cultures and ideas within the factory. I am adding this to the discussion as I believe it is vital in order to continue the speak about the workers conditions and the aim of production. To remind myself: I am the worker in the factory producing new knowledge for the market…….. quite likely, soon I will also have to pay for it. Not me just yet, as someone from an EU country, but soon: the hyper exploitation will be extended within the hierarchies of production society.

This will function as my condition.

So let’s unfold the cul de sac…

I will admit that the world exists outside the factory. but I believe that the academy is forming a specific production line for research and consequently a specific way of thinking. The frame of the institution has become an obstacle to a potential.

However, lets reframe this frame. Can the dissatisfaction of the conditions of production be a positive dissatisfaction? Can I use my dissatisfaction to re-fuse the context I find myself in. My experience of working collaboratively or as part of a collective more or less always takes its departure from a positive dissatisfaction.

My understanding of the word “refused” comes out of my interpretation of the Swedish hardcore punk band of the same name. “Refused” used their name to speak both about a dissatisfaction towards what was going on and as a spark to create a potential. Refused were a large part of my up bringing as they made their break through when I were in my mid teens and they were based in Umea, not far from where I grew up.

In Glasgow, a few years ago, I started together with my friends an independent music promoter called Nuts and seeds. The idea behind Nuts and Seeds was to put on concerts with bands whilst keeping the door prices low and affordable. Normally A night with 3 bands would cost around 4 pounds. The bands were paid well, in order to support them as part of a sustainable and ethical network for live music. Costs were kept low through our offering of our apartments as a place for them to sleep and eat. All the money made on the door went to cover`ing costs and paying the bands and for this reason there were no guestlists. Every effort was made to keep music inclusive, cheap, anti-eli`tist and fun.

Nuts and Seeds was not special, it simply formed from our dissatisfaction with how music was being organised and promoted in Glasgow. It is also formed because of our disinterest towards the type of music that most promoters were promoting at the time. We basically did not see the bands we wanted to see play in Glasgow. We could never give any financial guarantees to the bands, but there is not one single gig (even the most terrible) in which I felt we underpaid the bands. Instead many times we paid them far more than I ever got from exhibiting within a large institution.

By not organising ourselves to make a profit and because we refused the existing structure, we managed (atleast in my opinion) to sustain through this alternative, an ethos where ideas and relations were openly shared and distributed.

Nuts and seeds promoted their last gig earlier this year, just before most of us went on to live in other cities. We never aimed to compete with commercial promoters in Glasgow. We believed that music (but it could equally be dance or visual art or performance) could exist on other terms. By bringing our alternative structure within their realm we inadvertently created anger and anxiety among commercial promoters as we were not following their economical system.

For me this was always a sign that we were doing something good. We managed, through dissatisfaction, friendships, collaborations and alternative networks, to shake the existing frame.

We re-fused it.

Kl 14, den 17 februari, i Mandelgren, håller vi vårt första avdelningsmöte. Alla studenter och personal på konst är välkomna att delta!

Welcome to our department meeting, for students and staff at the Fine Art Department, February 17th, 2 pm. in Mandelgren.

This department meeting is meant to be one in a series of get together where the Konst department, staff and students meet and discuss the common issues, curriculum and developments at Konst.

One reason for wanting to establish these meeting is because we felt a lack of conversation between the different years and people, and/or students and staff. We felt that it was necessary to initiate a meeting where everyone could get together and discuss the direction and how to achieve the goals of the department.

1
At this first meeting, we hope that the initial discussion would revolve around what the meetings could be about. This could for example be: Do we need these meetings? and if so, what should we discuss at the meetings? How can we improve communication within the department, between students, teachers and staff? How can we easier access department information? How does one go about to suggest guest teachers? and perhaps most importantly; how shall these meetings be organized in the future.

2
The second part of the meeting hope to discuss the changes that has happened at konstfack and other universities. This is often refereed to as the “Bologna process”, which is a restructuring of university programmes to Bachelor and Master systems. While Konstfack is operating by using this system, it is not discussed publicly so often. These changes are crucial and we are already starting to see some of the consequences, as the government introduced large tuition fees for non-eu students last year. What impact will this have on the department and the dynamic within the department? What other changes can we expect from this these changes? How does this affect our education? our conditions for production? Perhaps even more importantly how does these questions translate to a larger tendencies in society?

Bezhad and Maryam Fanni (student at GDI) will do a short presentation of their forthcoming collaboration, which is to stage a demonstration at the spring exhibition about the newly added fees for non-eu students to study at Konstfack.

3
After this we will take it upstairs for some fun! Popcorn will be served and flicks will be screened. Lets get together and it will be alright. Fear the ripper and dance on the grave, never die alone and eat the things you crave!

With Loves.

Notes from meeting. Compiled by: Cecilia Hultman

Notes from department meeting 17/2 2011

The meeting started with a brief summary of the background and the reason for the meeting, which were:

– Longing for a meeting point and an opportunity to get and spread information and
discuss things we dislike.
– A platform for conversations and discussions without any hierarchies.
– A start for a natural contact between students and teachers in the art department, no
matter grade.

The first question that came up was the lack/problem with the spread of information, and how it can be changed. To much mail and no transparency in between the different grades’ (and departments) schedules were some of the problems that we (students at the meeting) could agree about. Different thoughts of solutions were given (physical info whiteboard with the newest information placed so that everyone pass it and use of google-calender). Still the problem would exist: the spread and amount of information at many different places. During the meeting Helen (Engman) also told us that “intranätet” will be better and easier to handle in a near future.

An other question that came up was the wishes for more short courses, open for all the art students. According to Olof (Glemme) that has been up at the teachers’ meeting and also fulfilled in a larger scale than before. Still there seems to be a lack of short courses like the Maura Lee text-course (which was taken as a good example).

Nicola (Bergström Hansen, in the M1) is our representative for web questions. We should turn to her with our thoughts and dreams about the net/server connected to school.

A question about getting financial support for having dinners to gather us students came up. The answer was that there is only money for the dinners that we usually have in the beginning of the autumn semester (Welcome dinner), the Christmas and the spring. These parties seem to have been dying out, but the shown interest from the students on the meeting tells that the interest is alive! So they will be held from now on. The welcome party for the new students are supposed to be arranged by the third graders. The Christmas party by second graders and the Spring party by the first years. (What about the master graders?)

As the second part of the meeting Behzad and his friend from the GDI department Maryam Fanni talked about the new system that demands students from countries outside EU and EES countries to pay for the education in Sweden. A system that probably wont give any students from abroad because of the high amount of money (more then 250 000:-/year). That is probably ending up with a homogeny society at the universities in Sweden. Therefore Behzad and his friend Maryam Fanni will stage a demonstration at the end of the semester, probably connected to the opening of the Spring exhibition in May.

The third part was consisting of popcorn and videos from YouTube in the kitchen …!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNmiUUDPxEg” Tariq Ali “SOAS occupation”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPR2VQqaQvo Slade Occupation Performance
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrgzpPvJxmQ The post ideological generation speaks!

Next meeting will be held in May and Thomas Elovsson is the teachers that will be having it together with some students. The students that are interested in being the student representative for the arranging of it should gladly turn to Thomas with their ideas for next time. Everything is possible!
One thing that was missed at the meeting was the question about what the form for the meeting. Should we have a standing form as a frame?

This first meeting was arranged by Andrea Creutz, Carolina Nylund (BA3) and Jens Strandberg (M2)

Thanks to everyone that participated. Nice to see you all! And for those who wasn’t there; welcome next time and don’t hesitate to arranging it and/or giving ideas for next opportunity!

Enlightenment Hearts is a group of reading enthusiasts who meet once a week to read and discuss an essay of their interest. The idea of reading together is that we can help each other to better understand the text. Each member is asked to read the text prior to the meeting and at the meeting we will read the text out loud allowing anyone the possibility to interrupt the reading to comment or ask questions. No one is an expert but together we will straighten out the question marks. Remember, one does not have to understand everything in the text, or the author, beforehand in order to come along, enough just to have read it through once.

—————————————————–Season 5 (The orientation of the hearts)—————————————————–

08.05.2012 Enlightenment Hearts reads the introduction to: Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, by: Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek (2000)
23.04.2012 Enlightenment Hearts reads: How to do things with words, by: J.L. Austin (1955)
17.04.2012 Enlightenment Hearts reads: Ein Ding Ist ein Thing – A (Philosophical) Platform for a Left (European) Party, by: Bruno Latour (1999)
10.04.2012 Enlightenment Hearts reads:‘The Strategy of Refusal’ by: Mario Tronti (1965)
03.04.2012 Enlightenment Hearts reads: a section from ‘The System Of Objects’ (Garap) p.10-28 by: Jean Baudrillard (1968)
27.03.2012 Enlightenment Hearts reads: ‘Marx and the philosophy of time’ by: Peter Osborn (2008)
20.03.2012 Enlightenment Hearts reads: a chapter from ‘History of Shit’ (Make Up) p.96-117 by: Dominique Laporte (2000)
13.03.2012 Enlightenment Hearts reads: ‘Intentional Objects for Non-Humans’ by: Graham Harman (2008)
06.03.2012 Enlightenment Hearts reads: ‘Laziness as the truth of mankind’ by: Kazimir Malevich ‘The praise of laziness’ by: Mladen Stilinovic and‘The project horizon: On the temporality of making’ by: Bojana Kunst (2011)

—————————————————–Season 4 (Rainbow Reading)—————————————————–

BROWN 28.02.2012 Enlightenment Hearts reads: ‘A phenomenology of whiteness’ by: Sara Ahmed
PURPLE 14.02.2012 Enlightenment Hearts reads: ‘Psychadelics in the Age of Intelligent Machines’ by: Terence McKenna
BLUE 07.02.2012 Enlightenment Hearts reads: ‘Populism and the Empowering Circulation of Myths’ by: Yves Citton
GREEN 31.01.2012 Enlightenment Hearts reads a chapter from: ‘Human Condition’ (Action) by: Hanna Arendt
YELLOW 24.01.2012 Enlightenment Hearts reads: ‘Art Without Work’ by: Anton Vidokle
ORANGE 17.01.2012 Enlightenment Hearts reads:’Feminist Engagement with Matter’ by: Myra J. Hird
RED 10.01.2012 Enlightenment Hearts reads: ‘Ecology of Practice and Technology of Belonging’ by: Isabelle Stengers

—————————————————–Season 3 (Pasta Season)—————————————————–

06.12.2011 Enlightenment Hearts seasonal final!!! Deconstruction of a pasta season, Jacques Derrida film from 2003 to be screened and a cut up session of texts read in the season.
22.11.2011 Enlightenment Hearts reads: ‘Stanzas’ chapters 7,8 and 9 by: Georgio Agamben
09.11.2011 Enlightenment Hearts reads: ‘Potentiality’ by: Georgio Agamben
18.10.2011 + 25.10.2011 Enlightenment Hearts reads: ‘The Great Caliban -The Struggle Against the Rebel Body’ by: Silvia Federici (2005)
11.10.2011 Enlightenment Hearts reads: ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspectives’, pp. 575–599, 1988 by: Donna Haraway
04.10.2011 Enlightenment Hearts reads: ‘Inspiration’ by: Peter Sloterdijk
20.09.2011 Enlightenment Hearts reads: ‘What Is an Apparatus?’ by: Giorgio Agamben
14.09.2011 Enlightenment Hearts reads: ‘Is it Possible to Reconstruct the Research Process – Sociology of a Brain Peptide’ by: Bruno Latour
31.08.2011 Enlightenment Hearts reads: ‘The Good of Work’ by: Liam Gillick

—————————————————–Season 2 (Pina Colada Season)—————————————————–

19.07.2011 Enlightenment Hearts reads: ‘Politics of Affects – Transversal Conviviality’ by: Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez
19.07.2011 Enlightenment Hearts reads: ‘What is an author’ by: Michelle Foucault
12.07.2011 Enlightenment Hearts reads: ‘Politics and passions the stakes of democracy’ by: Chantal Mouffe
05.07.2011 Enlightenment Hearts reads a chapter from: ‘For space’ (Slices through space) by: Doreen Massey
14.06.2011 Enlightenment Hearts reads a chapter from: ‘Are prisons obsolete?’ (Imprisonment and Reform) by: Angela Davis
07.06.2011 Enlightenment Hearts reads: ‘Smuggling -An Embodied criticality’ by: Irit Rogoff
31.05.2011 Enlightenment Hearts reads a chapter from: ‘Fish Story’ by: Allan Sekula
16.05.2011 Enlightenment Hearts reads a chapter from: ‘The Visible & The Invisible’ pp. 130-55 in the 1968 translation by: Merleau Ponty
10.05.2011 Enlightenment Hearts reads a chapter from: ‘The Practice Of Everyday Life’ by: Michel de Certeau
03.05.2011 Enlightenment Hearts reads a chapter from: ‘Invisible Cities’ by: Italo Calvino
26.04.2011 Enlightenment Hearts reads a chapter from: ‘Regulating Aversion’ (Tolerance As a Discourse of Depoliticization) by: Wendy Brown
12.04.2011 Enlightenment Hearts reads: ‘The Scene of a Flight’ by: Georges Perec
05.04.2011 Enlightenment Hearts reads: ‘Pierre Menard’ by: Jorge Luis Borges

—————————————————–Season 1 (Soup Season)—————————————————–

29.03.2011 Enlightenment Hearts reads: ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory’ by: Judith Butler
22.03.2011 Enlightenment Hearts reads the conclusion from: ‘Difference Repetition’ by: Gilles Deleuze
15.03.2011 Enlightenment Hearts reads a chapter from: ‘Difference Repetition’ by: Gilles Deleuze
08.03.2011 Enlightenment Hearts reads a chapter from: ‘Architecture from the outside’ (The Great Caliban
The Struggle Against the Rebel Body) by: Elizabeth Grosz
01.03.2011 Enlightenment Hearts reads two chapter from: ‘The Telephone Book’ (The Televisual Metaphysics and Derrida to Freud) by: Avital Ronell
22.02.2011 Enlightenment Hearts reads: ‘Mirror Stage, as formative of the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience’ by: Jacques Lacan
15.02.2011 Enlightenment Hearts reads: ‘Specific Objects’ by Donald Judd
08.02.2011 Enlightenment Hearts reads: ‘The Primacy of Perception and Its Philosophical Consequences’ by: Maurice Merleau-Ponty
01.02.2011 Enlightenment Hearts reads: A chapter from the book ‘Violence’ by: Slavoj Zizek
25.01.2011 Enlightenment Hearts reads: ‘Immaterial Labour’ by: Maurizio Lazzarato
18.01.2011 Enlightenment Hearts reads: A chapter from ‘Being and Time’ by Martin Heidegger

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
*****SEASONAL 3 FINAL*****
Music and fun, spilled glögg and some nuts on the floor. Slippery surface, cold face and a bit of bumbs on the road—–advent is here! and Enlightenment hearts are finishing off theseason a session of deconstruction..

The last supper will be served, it will be yet again PASTA!

This was not the regular Enlightenment meeting rather a practical pyssel-deconstruction-session. All we read was put into action while the film of Derrida was flickering in the background. Text were brought and made into philosophy-origami-decoration.. It was beautiful and as Valerie Solanas would put it. CUT EM UP!

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Season 2 (Pina Colada Season)

“Enlightenment Hearts, Cooking Compendium issue#2 Melted Ice-cream, why is there sand in my Pina Colada?” is the compendium for the summer period 2011.

It has been put together by E-Hearts members and contains the essay read while sun tanning. Each contribution is accomplished with a suitable drink as well as notes, therefore functioning as a notebook of this period. A note is the in between text, the unconscious text, the private text that one does not show and or the text that ketches ones thoughts for the larger text, a support structure.

“Enlightenment Hearts, Cooking Compendium issue#2 Melted Ice-cream, why is there sand in my Pina Colada?” is a chance to relive the memories of ice cream, discursive politics and swimming in sea!
In other words: don’t drink and drive! drink and read!

Enjoy.

Download:
Please note that the file is large. In order to download: right click/ctrl click (mac) and choose “download linked file”. Alternative view the pdf online.

Drinks:

1. Lime Zirma
2. Juniper-Beer
3. Seaweed (Sekula version)
4. Embodied Vodka
5. Equality Drink
6. Toddy ala Cognac Kürbis
7. Shandy (Shandygaff)

“Drink with care”

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Season 1 (Soup Season)

Download:
Enlightenment Hearts, Cooking Compendium#1 -its a soup!

Please note that the file is 17 mb large. In order to download: right click/ctrl click (mac) and choose “download linked file”. Alternative view the pdf online.

Recipes:

1. Potaje de Garbanzos – a chickpea stew or soup
2. Immaterial Curried Lentil Soup- No Work, No Soul, No Soup
3. Zuppa di Patate, Zucchini, e Menta
4. Potato Leek Perception
5. Thai Coconut Curry Lentil Soup c/o Healthy Living Blog
6. Verdens Beste Suppe (Som Er En Kremet Gulrotsuppe)
7. Authentic French Onion Soup Courtesy of Julia Child
8. Green Pea Soup
9. Sweet Potato Carrot Soup
10. I would like some carrots with my ginger
11. Butternut Squash soup

“Receipts and essays in a mixed bowl.”

Life is but a motion of limbs… For what is the heart, but a spring; and the nerves, but so many strings; and the joints but so many wheels, giving motion to the whole body… [Hobbes, Leviathan]

The body, then, enters the center of social policies… as container of labor power, a means of production, the primary work-machine [Federici, 2005:??]

This entry will connect the body, work and ideas of unproductive and reproductive labor, as an attempt to look at process as production. I will ground my argument on the idea that work more commonly happens outside the time officially designed worktime.¹ Students are workers, as students often have to work besides our studies. Conversely workers are students, pushed back into education in order to re-skill.² In this entry I will make claim that rationality has superseded magical powers (imaginary powers) and that the body is a container of these magical possibilities.

Workers Entering the Factory. This image of students entering Konstfack was made during my first year and was juxtaposed with a still from Louis Lumière classic film: Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory. Konstfack is a former Ericsson factory and was turned into a school in 2004.

I will begin this inquiry by drawing on Silvia Federici’s analysis of the transformation of the human body by capitalism made in her book Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. This book offers a detailed account of the relationship between the witch trials of the 16th and 17th centuries and the rise of capitalism, I will summarize the parts that relate to my research.

Federici’s analysis puts forward the argument, that in order for capitalism to rise “the body had to die so that labor power could live” [2005:??]. While it is not the materiality of the body that had to die, rather the idea of the body as being a container of mystical powers, of magic. This idea had to be destroyed, and was so, through classifying “irrationality as a true form of crime” [2005:??]. This was done through inventing the model of the state, Federici’s account continues, which “destroyed a vast range of precapitalist beliefs, practices, and social subjects whose existence contradicted the regularization of corporeal behavior promised by mechanical philosophy” [2005:??]. Unproductive” activities, such as play etc. had to be forbidden in order to create an hierarchization between productive and unproductive activities.³ According to Federici, the body had to undergo a “scientific” shift and become mechanicalized. Limbs, muscles, bones etc. had to be dissected, pulled apart, rationalized and studied. This shift corresponds with the passing from astronomy to social sciences (another rationalization) and produces the human body, as the receptacle of labor-power (however this had to be hidden in order to develop a hierarchization of work).

We see, in other words, that the human body and not the steam engine, and not even the clock, was the first machine developed by capitalism [Federici, 2005:??].

The workers body had first to be disempowered in order to ascribe additional value (surplus value) to the result of what the body produced (the commodity). The body is thus rationalized and controlled by social science (state), which means that it becomes a task of organizing social-bodies.⁴ In his diploma work, SOIL: Student Worker Inquiry, spent Kevin Dooleymuch of his time analyzing and translating texts by Mario Tronti from German to English, in order to see to what extent the social-factory hypotheses is valid today [Dooley, 2011:2]. I will not enter into detail of this theory as this is thoroughly explained in Dooley’s essay, instead I will highlight some themes that relate to Overhead and Behind and this glossary entry, Magic.

In viewing the body as a container of labor-power (consequently the provider of capital), the worker becomes the seller of labor-power, and consequently a capitalist.⁵

 - the idea that it is “working people” who are the true “givers of labour”… [is] Untrue…The truth of the matter is that the person who provides labour is the capitalist. The worker is the provider of capital. In the reality he is the possessor of that unique, particular commodity which is the condition of all the other conditions of production [Tronti, 1976].

So when an employer hires a worker, the agreed upon wage is for the work-capacity, for the labour-power, which is itself the property of the worker, but the wage is paid only upon the consumption of that labour-power, and its subsequent transformation into capital [Dooley, 2011:21].

The worker being the capitalist, selling his/her labour-power and time means that in capitalism the value of the labour-process has to be less than the value of the product. This means that into the product (the commodity) must be inserted a mystified value that is higher than the labour value.⁶ The commodity labor power is sold and valorized in the form of a wage. The devaluing-process of labour power, through the wage, is perhaps most strongly manifested in the separation of productive, unproductive and reproductive work. The difference between these types of work is that productive work is waged work while reproductive work is “the necessary labour, the work done in order to reproduce the conditions of work and the workers themselves” [Dooley 2011:27]. Perhaps this develops the marxist understanding of reproductive work, to not only including how humans reproduce biologically, but also expands to “how we care for one and other, how culture and ideology are reproduced, how communities are built and rebuilt and how resistance and struggle can be sustained and expanded” [Haiven, Federici, 2011]. Reproductive work has been key in Federici’s research and her involvement with the Wages for Housework movement.⁷ Wages for Housework sets out, as the name suggests, to argue for wages for doing housework. It was always contradictive, Federici herself once wrote Wages Against Housework [Federici, 1975]. Wages for Housework could only be “realized in a revolutionary situation where capital and the state have been eliminated from the situation”⁸ [Vishmidt, 2012]. Wages for Housework is first and foremost a wage which recognizes housework as work and that this exploitation of unpaid labour goes unchallenged and unseen in society [Federici, 1984:340]. Secondly it recognizes that housework is a common form of work and raises the possibility to uniting women struggle, who are the main doers of this type of work. It was a negation of labour of redefining reproductive as productive labour. The strategy is simple; rather than alienating women, who wanted to work at home taking care of their families, by telling them to get a job, Wages for Housework sets out to find common struggles that can unite women. Housework is reproductive labor that all share.

We believed that the women’s movement should not set models to which women would have to conform, but rather devise strategies to expand our possibilities [1984:340].

The school is another site of reproductive work, as it reproduces the workforce. That is to say, it produces graduates, the future workers, a primary capitalist commodity. Work done within the academy is more and more becoming essential in order to get a job. Lately one has witnessed educational cuts around Europe, even Sweden has been subject to cuts. Upon my arrival to Stockholm in 2010 I was confronted with the reform Govt. Bill 2009/10:65 worst known as Competing on the basis of quality – tuition fees for foreign students. (( The swedish name for this reform is Konkurrera med kvalitet – studieavgifter för utländska studenter http://www.sweden.gov.se/sb/d/12798 , 6 april 2012 ))  As the name entails, this reform inserts tuition fees for “third country students”⁹ meaning students from outside EU/EEA state or Switzerland. In my first year at Konstfack, I unfolded the episode A.S.A.P together with Maryam Fanni and Behzad Noori that aimed to discuss this governmental reform.¹⁰ Practically this reform means that it will cost 265.000 swedish crowns per year to study at Konstfack.¹¹ Using artistic means we aimed to generate a dialogue among students and staff at Konstfack, as we felt this reform had not been discussed within the academy. We learned a lot, even if we never generated an open discussion around the subject. We learned that this episode was more interesting for galleries than to the students and staff at Konstfack. More people outside of Konstfack knew about A.S.A.P than people within the school. We also learned that everyone was against the tuition fees. One can put it like this: The students blamed the teachers/professors for not doing enough, the teachers/professors blamed the administration for not doing enough, the administration blamed the rector for not doing enough, the rector blamed the educational department for not doing enough, the educational department blamed the government and although we never managed to arrange a meeting with the people in government responsible, I am certain that they also would have blamed higher instances. (( One can also look at this in this way: students felt they had done everything they could to stop the reform but that the teachers/professors did listen, the teachers/professors felt they had done everything they could to stop the reform but that the administrative did not listen, the administrative felt they had done everything they could to stop the reform but that the rector did not listen, the rector felt he had done everything he could to stop the reform but that the educational department did not listen, the educational department felt they had done everything they could to stop the reform but that the government did not listen )) Although students and teachers cared about the issue and supported us, no one did anything.¹² Teachers did not join our meetings, nor did we generate a debate over our heads concerning the subject in closed off meeting rooms (at least not one noted in minutes from meetings).

Our strategies to raise discussions were diverse including open breakfast with the rector, making reading compendiums, holding talks, arranging detention seminars in the rector of Konstfack’s office, making the slideshow The Last International Students at Konstfack etc. One of the more interesting strategies we used was to apply for money from Konstfack yearly internal scholarship meetings, which gives out small grants to students. We applied with the proposal The Structure of a Frame,which was a “project-proposal” (see entry for “project”) to study for one year at Konstfack.¹³ This proposal was an attempt to find strategies that would sneak into the administrative areas of Konstfack. It aimed to unlock the application process and all complications related to that, by collectivizing and consequently politicalizing that medium. The overall purpose of A.S.A.Pwas to question the government’s way of increasing quality within education. According to governmental statement “the change [the reform] intended to ensure that Swedish higher education institutions compete internationally on the basis of quality, not on the basis of free tuition.”¹⁴ Instead, we argued that this reform decreased the quality as it disables diversity, through inserting economic hinderances to access (See entry for “objects”). Looking back, my intuition is that we did wrong when trying to meet their argument with their methods. We put statistic against statistic, language against language, money against money, etc. What we did not do; was to insist on a completely other valorization system and “refuse work” [Tronti, 1965] or following Wages for Housework logic, A.S.A.Pshould not have demanded that “education must be free”, instead argued that education should be waged. That one should be paid to study. This would have been a radical move towards questioning the overall hierarchy of labour. The ironic part is that the reform creates an economic catastrophe towards the future work force, as some people can’t afford it. It is in other words, a major cut in the student body.¹⁵ George Caffentzis has said that rises in tuition fees effectively function as wage cuts. I quote Dooley quoting Caffentzis’ essay University Struggles at the End of the Edu-Deal.¹⁶

He [Caffentzis] states that “with the elimination of stipends, allowances, and free tuition, the cost of ‘education’, i.e. the cost of preparing oneself for work, has been imposed squarely on the work-force, in what amounts to a massive wage cut”. [Caffentzis, 2010] Thus what’s left is a system whereby one has to pay (and pay a lot) in order to have the chance to access waged work [Dooley, 2011:9].

This is the goal for a capitalist, to devalue work, to unwage work, as this increases the profit. Federici argues that this begins in the 16th century, with the alienation of the body (creating the work machine), concurrently with the enclosure of the commons (forcing workers to earn free time) as well as the outspread witch-hunt around Europe (oppression of women’s right and rationalization of science and knowledge).

By creating unpaid labour or paying for some labour and not other through the means of wage, capital transforms and rationalizes labor-process so that it becomes productive, i.e. it creating hierarchical difference between productive, reproductive and unproductive labor, while all depend on the other. A lower wage inscribes higher profit for the capitalist, whose primary aim is to make as much capital as possible from the “valorization-process”¹⁷ . The capitalist goal is to devalue waged work turning it into unwaged work, making productive and unproductive labor the same by having us work for free, perhaps best summed up in the term “playbour”¹⁸ . This is a transformation of labor where workers should not only work for free, but even in some cases (as with eduction), pay for working (in the form of tuition fees).

Paying to work is a form of “primitive accumulation”¹⁹ something Federici sees as essential character of capitalism, compared to Karl Marx who claims it as a precursor for capitalism. Primitive accumulation is when “capital pays the worker non-reproductive wages, (wages to low to produce a new generation of workers)” [Dooley, 2011: 29]. Looking locally one can see students in academies who are working in competitions to develop products for companies, furniture, graphic profiles etc. in exchange for “cultural capital”.²⁰ Additionally graduating students are more and more required to take up unpaid internships that are exploitative and promise “a foot into the business”. When educational reforms force students to pay for studying, it is primitive accumulation, it is a hyper-exploitation, one pays (sometimes with capital sometimes with time) in order to work, to maybe get a paid job afterwards.²¹

When students are employed by the academy (which happens quite often) their work tasks are often reduced to service work. I myself was recruited by my professor to be her “right hand” and organize a series of lectures at the academy ironically these lectures were named Activating Public Attention.

“Activating Public Attention is series of presentations where invited speakers discussed from within their own practice of art, writing and curating a set of concerns foregrounding art as a social practice. Beginning with the proposal for an active role art plays in the making of an engaged public…  …In what kind of platforms for exchange and dialogue would we like to participate?

As the commercial concerns aggressively threaten the collective ownership of knowledge and creativity, there is no better place than the university and the art school to fully explore and perhaps defend our rights to disagreement as well as being in common” [Lewandowska, 2012].

I had hoped that this outstretched hand from my professor would enable the possibility to develop the series together, level our knowledge, listen to each other while creating “public realms”, i.e. a shared space in which my own voice my professor’s voice would count for the same. I had hoped that this joint endeavor would enable me to suggest lectors, even though this would run the risk of jeopardizing the “quality” of the lecture series (as I would perhaps suggest the “wrong” people). Instead my role was deskilled to printing posters, which were preprogrammed and predesigned, and put these up around the school premises. None of my suggestion were met, instead I was given the schedule for the lecture series in an email, when it was all set. I was paid a wage for my labour, which is important to note in this context and in my opinion the intention of my professor were good. She tried through including me in the process to change procedures, blur the distinction between our roles. However this process was mistakenly un-emancipated²² and did not bring about any actual hierarchical change. She wants me to do well, she wants me to become an artist, through connecting me with these political thinkers. My intuition says that she wanted to produce a “political subject” out of me. However, the problem lies in just this; trying to produce political subjects/artists etc.

This does not work because the labour process was stultifying the theory was not embodied. Instead of activating a public situation, through assigning a student with responsibility (more radically it could have opened up the labour process to the whole class), the product was given higher value than the labour process. This made it impossible to practice being ignorant and behind and impossible to together learn how to create an “interesting” lectures series. (( One should of course add that this does not mean that my suggestions were bad or would not have created an interesting lecture series. This might have been the case, but we will never know )) My critique is therefore that professors are waged (and quite well) to equip (unwaged) students with the necessary tools to become leading within their field. Practically, this seems to mean that students need to be deskilled in order to be skilled, or under-stand in order to understand (see introduction). My professor forgot to pay close “attention” to her own soil, she forgot to activate public attention in the making.

Whether or not an academy provides a good education is often judged by its capacity to produce products, in the form of graduates. In art academies it also seems to invoke a process of mystifying the product (the student), by making the entrance exam and conditions almost impossible to meet, this creates a higher desire for the education. Therefore it has to produce “successful” students/artists, as this increases the schools value. Thus any academies are forced to reproduce the idea of the artist (or the political artists) rather than to generate reproductive situations that can re-valorize the valorization system, as a whole.²³ When students are put into a system of under-standing professors, the possibility to pragmatically activate public attention in the construction of a situation is undermined and emancipated learning situations for both students and professors, in order to practice other valorization system, is made impossible.²⁴

Any academy continues an elimination process that it embraces from the very beginning. When some people are refused entrance the act of given acceptance by the institution is mystified and inserted with surplus value. Some must fail in order that those who make it are valorized, speaking more broadly; some have to be unemployed in order to create the desire for employment. With this model it becomes more effective to make result orientated projects as this allows one to project the outcome, to more easily reach the goal (see entry for project).

Overhead and Behind is a proposal to slow down not just myself but also to be the idiot who slows down the others “…the idiot that does not deny articulated knowledge, does not denounce it as lies…” [Stengers, 2005:997] but that inserts vulnerability and doubt into a situation. The aim is to allow situations to be imaginary and present, not projected.

Let me here return quickly to primitive accumulation, as this is where my anecdote began. Silvia Federici argues that primitive accumulation is an essential part of capitalism, that must be expropriated. This means that capital needs to exploit in order to function and it also needs to reinvent this exploitation in order to continue to function

One could accuse the academies or the professor’s of stultifying through their objectives, but this would only serve to disempower the student further, as well as projecting responsibility. I too could have organized and practiced anti-capital strategies that would not conform thinking or work towards a product, but that instead might have emancipated the situation, as “only an equal understands an equal” [Rancière, 1991:73]. In other words, it was no ones fault but the possibility to use the situation differently was everyone’s.

One of the questions for Overhead and Behind is simply to examine what is over ones head and what it means to be behind. This entry is an attempt to locate power in the multitude of individuals rather than in the institution. Power is in the individuals that make up the institution and not in the institution itself, as this would be projected power. Instead we would need to recognize the power that already resides in everyone and how we can make use of this by self organizing and though common strategies. School work has the potential to find the commons and unlock these realms. It is through recognizing and refusing conditions that one can emancipate the role of the self in relation to the institution.

Institutional objectives may emerge as dictating superstructures, which through a constant rational projection to form products (graduates) hinders actual research, in favor of finishing the projected ends. These directories streamline work and making it impossible to move outside of their superstructures. These structures are so engraved in the institution that they could be said to form a “wall”. But by locating the power (magic) within the multitude of bodies and discharge the institution, one can cause a rupture of the situation that could bring about another system. With that in mind one should not undermine the power of the institution. But in practicing a non projective power relation and building up communities that do not set models to which students (workers) have to conform, but rather device strategies to expand possibilities [Federici, 1984:340], the magic of the multitude will be released.

Thus we return to what began this entry; that of the body as the container for imaginary possibilities, of magic. It is through Federici’s analysis of pre-capitalist development that the deprivation of the potentials of the body is illuminated. In upholding the belief that power resides outside the body, outsides ones boundary, and  is located in the wall, the possibilities of imaginary situations disappear. This is a fundamental prerequisite for capitalism but by activating the power we as a multitude of individuals already possess, we recharge the body with the potential for change, making it possible to imagine long term reproductive support structures.

This brings about one of the foundations for Overhead and Behind, that of working together (see entry for collaboration). All episodes include collaboration, a relational way of finding a commons that can unite people. It is a way of creating public spheres, not just one, but many and all the time. This enables one to collectively reclaim power over the situation, to pay close attention to all aspects of the production and to refuse the institution.

1.  See: Student Workers Inquiry Part I: Soil  [Dooley, 2011]
2. It is here interesting to consider that Konstfack is the former factory of the telecom company Ericsson. The interior has been redesigned when it was made into a school, curiously keeping the layout where the boss (the professors) can overview the workers (the students), as their offices are located above the design students studios. See Letter Refused forthcoming in Konstfack School Paper #1 for a longer footnote on this, or Sam Kennedy Why Are All the Chairs at Konstfack Red?
3. Perhaps this is especially shown in the forbidding of “unproductive” forms of sexuality, e.g. homosexuality 
4. Through, self-discipline, self-control, self-development etc. 
5. One should clarify that there is a key difference within Tronti’s work between labor and labor-power. Labor is understood as the activity of producing while Labor-power as a person ability to work. Labor= work act, and labor-power= work capacity (emphasizes are mine). [Dooley, 2011:21]
6.  It is interesting to think about this in relation to Dominique Laporte book History of Shit, which follows the byproduct of human (shit) transformation and mystification into a commodity, through religious mystification. Is the act of shitting a labor process? 
7. Wages for Housework was a feminist marxist movement in 1970’s that was initiated by Selma James, Mariarosa Dalla Costa and other key feminist activists and writers.
8. Vishmidt, Marina, 2012, Counter (Re-) productive Labour http://autoitaliasoutheast.org/blog/news/2012/04/04/counter-re-productive-labour/ (06/04/2012) 
9. This is the phrase used by the government.
10. According to our manifest, A.S.A.P may stand for Academy of Students Against Privatization or Artists in Solidarity And Protest or Articulate See Align Postpone or Ask Schools About Privatization or Artist Showing the Academic Poverty or Act as Soon As Possible. See: http://www.1200m.org/jens/episodes/a-s-a-p for more info.
11.  This roughly translates as 30.000 Euros
12.  Although this is looked at in a microcosmos, it is interesting to think how this function outside of the white walls of Konstfack. To see how decisions are distributed and pushed from one table to another, where no one has the overview to see all parts of what they are deciding. More commonly to distribute tasks so that the state can take a backseat, or withdraw their responsibility completely from the decision. The curator and critic Simon Sheik highlighted this in a lecture at PAF (Performing Art Forum) summer school 2011, where he suggested that privatization of the state that has been happening around Europe the last decades, and which normally is seen as conservative politics to decrease taxes etc. could also be viewed as a withdrawal of responsibility, as the government is not responsible if the rail system does not work, or if the hospital is doing a bad job. One can perhaps say that this makes it harder to criticize conservative, market orientated politics, because there is nothing to criticize, everything has been outsourced….On the other hand one can criticize that, i.e. the privatization and the withdrawal of taking responsibility. 
13.  The Structure of a Frame
    I would like my proposal The structure of a frame to be considered at Konstfack’s next scholarship committee meeting. The funding of 265 900 Swedish crowns will go towards the costs of studying for one year on the masters programme at Konstfack and towards the application fee of 900 Swedish crowns.

    During this project I will continue to develop my research, which explores notions of what transpositional possibilities can be.

    The structure of a frame is part of an ongoing research project entitled: Intersectional Structures; The Politics of Space. This research consists of a series of events, through which I aim to question the crucial role that “location” and “positioning” play in the production of art and culture. In an artwork later this year I decided to elaborate on the discussion of what location is and how it can be publicly discussed. Although un-concluded it aimed to discuss how collective working strategies within artistic production can create “Public”.
    One of the focus points for this project is to look at the new reform agenda regarding tuition fees for non European students. I consider this to be part of a larger context which leads to a privatization of thinking.

    This economical change will have a huge impact on the working conditions within the academy and also within society at large. The new circumstances risk establishing an economic border and consequently may bring into question the fundamentals of a democratic society.

    In the forthcoming production, as part of the masters programme at Konstfack, I will aim to focus more on concepts related to “positions” and “position-taking” as a mode of intersectional thinking. I am especially keen to develop a thesis that explores the crucial role played by economic constraints, in allowing transpositional possibilities to exist, within the field of knowledge production.

    The project will perform an occupation of space, as a political act. It will begin by inviting thinkers from various backgrounds to a series of talks, on the cultural economy and the importance of taking a position. This think tank will provide the platform for the ongoing research. A forthcoming publication will later be produced which will aim to “demonstrate” the various transpositional perspectives that will arise from “The structure of a frame”.

    On this endeavor I would appreciate your support.

    The emphasize are mine. (A.S.A.P was not granted any money) 

14. Konkurrera med kvalitet – studieavgifter för utländska studenter http://www.sweden.gov.se/sb/d/12798 6 april 2012
15.  An excerpt from the play, Cover story act II: A Footnote of an Object (revisited in the form of a play) cuts the cake in order to serve it.

    Mother Tongue: We will just cut the objects
    Mother Tongue: just the objects
    Fatherland: the targets
    Student Body: the body
    Mother Tongue: The goal
    Student Body: Sculpturing
    Fatherland: The form
    Mother Tongue: this is the reform
    Student Body: Please do not cut us!
    Mother Tongue: This is the body
    Student Body: We are the body, but scaled down into one person due to budget cuts and practicalities for being here tonight.
    Fatherland: Always blaming me for everything
    Student Body: No…
    Mother Tongue: Let’s make the cut
    Student Body: No.
    Fatherland: Its just a small cut
    Student Body: No…
    Fatherland: No-one will notice.
    Mother Tongue: One can say that things gets sharper and quality increases when one cut things off.
    Student Body: Do you not hear us? we don’t want to be cut…

    Fatherland: Yes good formulated! We increase quality… and if we cut off the infected parts, the rest of the body will survive. In fact I don’t think anyone will notice, as infected parts are unwanted. Later we can re-define the infected parts and cut another small part.
    Mother Tongue: Great idea, lets cut everyone except the ones with the “right” mother tongue.
    Fatherland: Very cute, lets execute this.

    See: http://www.1200m.org/jens/episodes/cover-story for video and full script.

16.  To read Caffentzis article see: http://www.metamute.org/content/university_struggles_at_the_end_of_the_edu_deal 
17. The creation of commodities. 
18.  “Playbour”, a term invented to merge the relation between play and labour.
19. Primitive accumulation can generally be described as theft and stealing.
20.  There are many other examples of primitive accumulation, most obviously in how large companies exploitation of labor and poor people. Additionally a more advanced plan is the UK conservative party campaign The Big Societywhich aim is “to create a climate that empowers local people and communities, building a big society that will take power away from politicians and give it to people”. This is done through encouraging communities to do more voluntary work, basically an attempt to replace work with unwaged work.
21.  See: Marc Bousquet and Tiziana Terranova’s discussion in the article Recomposing the University, London: Mute Magazine. http://www.metamute.org/en/recomposing-the-university or A.S.A.P reader compendium. 
22.  I am making use of the word “emancipated” as a reference to Jacques Rancière’s theory put forward firstly in The Ignorant Schoolmaster  here quoted in The Emancipated Spectator: “The opposite of stultification is emancipation. Emancipation is the process of verification of the equality of intelligence. The equality of intelligence is not the equality of all manifestations of intelligence. It is the equality of intelligence in all its manifestations” [Rancière, 2005]
23.  This is visible in Konstfack’s vision put through 15.02.2011 “Konstfack shall create new knowledge and play a leading role, nationally and internationally, in artistic education and research as well as in the professional development of artistic subjectsand practitioners.” See: https://www.konstfack.se/en/About-Konstfack/This-is-Konstfack/Konstfacks-vision/  
24. The academy gets a better reputation the more “successful” artists it manages to produce. It will most likely also get more support from the government if it can show that students progress in the work market after completing education.

Expanding and redoing my website became key to publicly making sense of my doings. This place was initially set-up in 2005, as I wanted to create a site which would not be tied to one individuals name but would instead function as an umbrella structure for practices that I found particularly interesting. Each practice is allocated a space, which can be used in whatever way preferred.¹

Beginning at Konstfack I invited the artist and designer Pål Bylund to help me redesign my part of the website.² I wanted it to become a space where my research sequentially could be collected, archived and made public. My part is structured in five sub-parts: about, episodes, links, relevance, publications and upcoming. Most of the parts are self-explanatory, but I will quickly contextualize “episodes” and “relevance”, which are the two main parts I am making use of.

Relevance enables me to upload a registry of material that relates to my doings: e.g. films I see, texts I read, sketches, sounds I hear etc. Episodes are basically art works, but by renaming it in this terminology is an attempt to ascribe a new order of value. An episode hints that the works are connected and in flux, one episode comes from and will be followed by another. Episodes become series of events (or a series of episodes) and indicate, continuation and a trajectory. This does however not imply an end or a direct aim of the work as it is made in time, duration, speed “as the world turns”³

An episode is continuously made public, meaning that it unfolds the material in the making, allowing the process to be transparent. Making the making, of an episode, public inserts a revaluation of the end, as it allows “(non)significant moments in a research, generating a myriad of traces, evidences suggestions etc. and consequently overcoming the weight of the final presentation” [Kunst, 2011: 17]. This act implants a greyscale into the understanding of concepts such as “public”, as it creates, what I will call, a “hyper-public”, meaning the moment an episode meets an increased public situation, e.g. an exhibition, performance event etc. These moments are hyper public as they are enhanced public situations compare to for example when an episode exists on my part of the website. In these situations, one should insist on letting the episode unfold at its own pace and reject the instinct to work towards completion. This means that the episode should be possible to show in a hyper-public setting at any given point, sometimes completed and sometimes in a more drafted state.

Temporality is a crucial component when insisting on this renaming of art work to episodes, as temporarily is not to follow a trajectory that works towards a goal and is instead an ongoing insertion of public nows.

1. At the moment there are seven artistic practices and projects represented: Giles Bailey, Kevin Dooley, myself, A.S.A.P, Nuts and Seeds, Draw or Die and Grizzlyhoppers. There are also other non-public initiatives connected to the site, e.g. Schoolworks, which is a research platform that examine the relationship between work and school and school and work, or the research Troubling Research -Performing Knowledge in the Arts. 
2. www.1200m.org/jens
3. As The World Turns is the longest serving tv soap-opera. It was canceled in 2010 after broadcasting for 54 years with an amazing number of episodes 13,858.

This short entry will try to sketch up some of the concepts that are connected with the position of behind.

The first impression when thinking of behind is that it refers to physically standing at the rear side of someone, or to physically place an object further back from another. Within Overhead and Behind, the notion of “behind” refers to the theory of vulnerability and the act of “slowing down”, i.e. not understanding, as well as to support, e.g. we are behind your ideas.
The act of being behind does not mean an individuals inability to comprehend a thing, or idea, being communicated, but rather it is an act of complicating (or over-standing) the communicated message, something which is often dismissed as negative within schools and professional surroundings. With this I mean; being behind insists on being an empowering position, as this inserts vulnerability, while aiming to avoid authority.

In her essay A Cosmopolitical Proposal Isabelle Stengers argues for the idea of “slowing down the construction of this common world, to create a space for hesitation regarding what it means to say ‘good’” [Stengers, 2005: 995]. Stengers points to the danger of reproducing practices to become universal neutral keys applicable to all situations [2005: 995]. Instead she argues for practices that only have meaning in particular situations and because of this avoid authority. This is to add perplexity to a situation, to slow down and look askew and to insist that “there is something more important”[Stengers 2005: 994] an ability possessed by the idiot. The idiot “resists the consensual way in which the situation is presented and in which emergencies mobilize thought or action” [2005: 994]. This does not mean that the idiot knows what is more important, instead this figure only knows that there is something that requiring hesitation. Being behind is to comprehend through the means of translation, it is an interruption device that can be put into practice. It is a way to reorientate, to not look at what is in front of us within out reach, but rather what lies behind us. It is an ignorant supportive element where one stands “behind”in order to strengthen each other.

The main period for using overhead projectors were prior to developments of data projectors. Overhead projectors differs from data projectors in many ways, especially in terms of the physical present as well as quality of graphics. The key difference that is used as an allegory for the making of Overhead and Behind is that an overhead projector allows a speaker to restructure a presentation live when presenting.

PowerPoint slideshows are typically projected in a fixed order, making it more difficult for the speaker to easily rearrange the slides during the presentation. This fact marks an important distinction between the PowerPoint presentation and the presentation made using overhead transparencies [Orlikowski,Yates, forthcoming: 16].

This implies that Overhead and Behind follows the nature of an overhead projector presentation by allowing its structure to fluctuates. This differentiates completely from presentations done with software such as Keynote or PowerPoint, which dictates the presentation [Strandberg 2008]. Digital presentation are slides preprogramed prior to the presentation, hence making it difficult to change the narrative. Or in shorter terms, as design critic Edward Tufte puts it “relentless sequentially, one damn slide after another” [Tufte, 2003]

An introduction and a conversation

In 2011 we were invited to make a work for a group exhibition that will take place in Leeds in mid November. The invitation was made to us by two friends who had been working collaboratively for a period of time, but at a distance, corresponding through letters. The act of correspondence, for them, had become a crucial part in developing ideas for the exhibition as well as setting its parameters and structure. We had both played some role in their letters leading them to invite us to produce a work specifically through collaboration. We had never before collaborated, in fact our work seemed to completely lack any obvious relationship. As we see it an invitation is always a challenge, it sets forward a trajectory and forces one to formulate and define ideas that otherwise would remain undefined.

At the same time as struggling to find a direct connection between our practices we were also struggling to form a relationship to the site of the exhibition, Leeds College of Art. Both of us felt a similar lack of enthusiasm for making a work which did not in some way deal with the context of the college. How could one relate to the college without ever having attended it, or without having been there? One thing we could relate to was what it was like to go to an art school. We had both been trained in colleges like Leeds College of Art, before “progressing” on to Batchelor of Art (BA) and now Master of Art (MA) level. To a certain extent we are both products of the art education system, something which became clear to us through this invitation. Simply put, the objectives of Leeds College of Art are to prepare people from across the UK to enter into a BA program in art or design like the ones here at Konstfack.

If, then, preparation was the context, how could we prepare ourselves to work together? As we said earlier our fields of interest were seemingly fairly separate. Sam studies in the interior architecture department and has a practice centered on the physical object. Jens meanwhile had seemingly stopped making work of physical material, instead choosing to make work based around organization and discussions. He is now studying in art department on the course Art in the Public Realm. It was in this limbo of different forces that we began to define a common ground where we thought we could meet. In other words we began discussing not only what could combine our work and the site of exhibition but also how we could use this invitation to develop a side of our working process that was latent. Our discussion came to rest on our different ideas of what we meant by “object” and what this could mean in the context of an exhibition at Leeds School of Art.

This word, which is both a verb and a noun, which has both a physical and notional character, which is both objective and subjective, seemed to take in much of what we are both concerned with. This essay is structured as a “conversation” between the two of us and how we relate to this word. This conversation is completely influenced by the time we have spent together, the reading we have done together and the discussions we have had. This essay is our attempt to map out a ground on which we will stand, a “support structure” which we hope will allow us to make a response to the invitation we received to produce work for Leeds College of Art.

Before beginning we would like to make our process a little bit more transparent. Working together is always difficult, especially when the constellation is imposed. Through our method we hoped to find a common language. One of our initial attempts at this was to establish a reading group, in which we began by reading Bruno Latour’s “We have never been modern”. Each section of this book was read prior to our meetings, during which we would take it in turns to read aloud for the other. This book, which might seem to have been plucked out of thin air, became a crucial reference point for our discussions, which have developed alongside its slow reading and re-reading. It has consequently lead us to other essays that have helped us expand our relationship to the subject. In this way one can say that the reading group has become a mediator between us, a tool for discussing a complex topic. Other texts have also influenced us and been important in creating a shared language, e.g. Jacques Ranciére, Chus Martinez, Martin Heidegger, Chantal Mouffe, Michel de Certeau, Merleau Ponty, Doreen Massey, Raymond Williams, Maija Timonen, George Caffentzis, Nina Power, Simon Sheikh and Celine Condorelli. It is from this agonistic ground that we set out to challenge ourselves and our working method. It is also from here that the following conversation originates.

1. object
Noun

It is hard to describe ones immediate environment without using the words object or thing. An example. Most people are so familiar with the computer’s keyboard that they can type without thinking about the position of the keys. If we stick to the letters we know well, the end of the text might arrive without us even having noticed the keyboard at all. If, on the other hand, one of the keys gets stuck down, or if say, we want to introduce a semi-colon; all of a sudden the keyboard transforms. Something that was felt only through fingers and which went largely unnoticed by the rest of the consciousness, comes precisely into view. The keyboard becomes defamiliarized. All of a sudden we don’t know it in the same way. This defamilarization and representation for a subject is how a thing is transformed into an object.¹

But keys rarely get stuck down. More commonly things work quite well whether we notice them or not. Our world is composed of these things that do not need to be noticed, in order to exist. A wall is a wall, whether or not one is there to see it being a wall. Similarly a floor is a floor whether or not we walk over it. The world of things is everyday, it exists despite us but it is also, at all times around us. It shapes every action we make, affecting every part of our lives. If we were to trace the writing of this text back to the beginning we would encounter a huge heap of these things which were necessarily taken for granted, so that we could think only about writing. Similarly if we were to thoroughly investigate the story of the paper on which this essay should be printed, we would come into contact with an every expanding network of things; trees, water, machines, chemicals etc.

In philosophy, one usually refers to a subject as “a being that has subjective experiences”.² According to the etymological definition of the noun object it is a thing which is thrown in the way³ of the subject. The separation of the object from the subject arrives at the beginning of the history of Modernity.⁴ Modernity was built one separation after another. The first was modern from pre-modern, or now from then. The moderns aimed to define what came from us and what came from the world. Hence modernity was a splitting up, categorization and purification of everything in the natural and social world.⁵ This was followed by further separations within these two categories. To cut a long story short, one can say that the story of the object and the subject in modernity is also a story of private property and in the long run of consumption. It is the story of what is mine and what is yours.

If the object is defined through separations then things are defined through their combinations.⁶ The etymological root of the word thing means “a gathering together of matters of concern”.⁷ Things are defined by their nearness and fuzzy borders. To call something a thing is to not have the complete image of it in one’s mind. The thing exists in a state of support, it stands beside, on top of, under, to the left or right of, it exists in relationship with other things. As humans, when we come into contact with things it is with all our senses. What would it take to re-imagine the “Modern world”⁸ of detached objects as a world made up of connected things?

The problem with thinking about things is that as soon as we give them our attention we, in some way, perform an extraction. We separate the thing from its environment, turning it into an object in front of a subject. Instead of looking at things and turning them into objects one can look between them. What are the nature of the connections that tie things together? In asking this question we may be able to get to a better understanding of things. A brief return to the computer. It now stands on top of the table a certain height above the ground, a height proven comfortable to work at provided there is a chair. The chair, the table, the computer, all these things support each other and are needed.⁹ Going unnoticed through all of this is the floor, without which everything would be falling down to who knows where? Or gravity which keeps everything from floating away.¹⁰

In order for the dependency of a thing to be satisfied, support must be consistently and unremittingly provided. The need of one relies on the generosity of the other, as soon as one side is removed the fragile relationship that makes up the thing collapses. In this analogy things are continuously being made and remade, never static always changing.¹¹ This is where it could be interesting to think about things in relationship to time, not as in the Modernist idea of time as an irreversible trajectory.¹² Instead as a relational time, a thing as a collection of moments when need is felt and support is offered.

Still from the video, “Composition as Explanation”, Kennedy/Strandberg, 2011

2. object
verb

This section of our conversation will focus on the verb to object. A quick look in the etymological dictionary shows that both the noun and the verb come into use in the 14th century. Although they appear distinct from each other, one defined as something thrown in one’s way, the other as a declaration of a disapproval,¹³ they do etymologically connect. Both the verb and the noun stem from Latin word objectus, which means “to put or throw before or against”. This interpretation implies a person making an act in opposition to something or someone.

Before continuing our conversation around the verb to object, we would like to return to the context for making this work, the common conditions which allow connections between two distinct colleges, Leeds college of art and Konstfack. This educational system, which both academies are part of is the working condition within which this text exists, as well as premise for the art work we will make. Instead of thinking about the keys that are stuck down on the keyboard we want to refocus on the larger context.

Both Leeds college of art and Konstfack are signatures to a reform that is called the Bologna process. This can quickly be summed up as a European attempt to make it easier for students to move between universities, by standardizing the educational system and insisting on an efficient way of evaluating degrees e.g. BA and MA degrees. Although this is not particularly the place to dwell on this reform, one can say, based on the evidence so far, that the Bologna process has had a largely negative effect on education, particularly on art education.¹⁴ Our own experience is that universities have not become more efficient, instead administrative work seems to have increased, leading to additional costs. At Konstfack it now takes at least three board meetings to change or develop a course¹⁵ potentially leading to the stagnation of programs. The initiation of the Bologna process was soon followed by the introduction of tuition fees for students in most European universities. In the last few years one could witness students demonstrating against, both the Bologna process and the tuition fees. These are some of the conditions that we, as students at Konstfack, share with those at Leeds college of art.

Another thought: Our intuition is that material objects are swallowed up by an art market, no matter how hard an artist tries to radically break with the current conditions. Works are formed only as reforms of the current trend. Even the most radical art works or the most avant-garde artists have been absorbed by private collectors and companies, or made into museums artifacts. The role of the art institution is only to organize them and insert them on a chronological axis and into a narrative trajectory. The art institution becomes a place for legitimating objects. The curators and historians are the police,¹⁶ the police that polices the organizational system, that defines the law, which “divides the community into groups, social positions and functions”.¹⁷ This law decides partitions and distributes those with rights to take part and those that are excluded.¹⁸

One could imagine us together with our friends in Konstfack having wild discussions about how we will change the world we live in. Explaining to our Professors, we would tell them how our designs or art works will make the world less capital driven or more gender equal, or simply more fair for everyone. This is what many artists, including ourselves, strive for with their art work. How far away are we from change when all our objects do, is to confirm the tradition of the trajectory. The choice seem to be limited, one either confirms the tradition or stops making work. What if, instead of explaining to our Professors how, we exchange it with when.

When do we change the world? When do we make it less capital driven? When does it become more gender equal? To try to relate these questions to art, we paraphrase the title of Raymond Williams short essay “When was Modernism?”¹⁹ and ask when is art?²⁰ In this line of thought it seems to us that when objects reach the public institution the art has already happened. The exhibition is only a public declaration of a completed thought, an object, the evidence of a private experience had by an artist. What if we replace objects with unfinished thoughts? What if we replace completion with fragments? What if we look for temporariness instead of the permanency? Never becoming standardized by a reform but always contesting and aiming to re-form.

The question of public and private is thus a crucial one. Most exhibitions and art schools including Konstfack want to deal with the notion of public.²¹ This is a place that is always becoming a place, “a public sphere”²² where one practices democracy and can agree or disagree on a subject in “conflictual consensus”.²³ An art exhibition implies a public display, but what is public about that display when the art work is speaking and not listening? How can one discuss, engage and contest what is being said in public when the declaration is made from the private space, e.g. the artist studio or the artist bedroom? If art is ways of “doing and making”²⁴ in the world, should it not also include ways of listening?

This is where we can return to our conversation around the verb to object. One can break with the police order by objecting, extracting oneself from the dominant trajectory. In order for this objection to also be emancipatory,²⁵ one must also listen. “Emancipation is the process of verification of the equality of intelligence… It is the equality of intelligence in all manifestations”.²⁶ Because an objection requires, as we earlier said a disagreement with something or someone and that disagreement should be public.

How and when should one object? The answer is easy, one should continuously object! Not by extracting oneself from the dominant order in an antagonistic way but instead by continually contesting the established frame in an agonistic way.²⁷ The agonistic object should be a disagreement made public with agreed upon principals.²⁸ It should share a symbolic space of listening and talking to each other. An object should not be made in the private and transferred to the public, nor should the object be made in public while moving to the private. It should be formed and re-formed continuously through conversation. In this way the educational system can be shaped by all levels of knowledge and power. Thinking is always unfinished, objects should be always re-formed, scribbles are just another way of writing, people never stop learning. One should not assume that we, the students, should just listen to the monologue of our Professor, or sit waiting for a verdict. Instead we should continually contest these structures and not allow our working conditions to remain a standardized stagnant reform. By allowing space for agonistic objection and equal transmission of knowledge, separation can remain within and transform the system.

“The Objects is Complication” is an artwork conceived for the exhibition“August 2002 – ongoing, and back” (Leeds College of Art, 16th Nov – 16th Dec, 2011). Simone Wonnacott, principal of Leeds College of Art, agreed to carry a sculpture with her for the duration of the exhibition. Under the terms of the contract signed by all participants, Simone Wonnacott were obliged to make this artwork available to students of the school and the wider public by appointment. It was possible to book an appointment or stop by her office at Blenheim Walk to view this artwork. “The Objects is Complication” is a copy of the sculpture “Reclining Woman: Elbow” from 1981 by Henry Moore, which is on display outside the Leeds art gallery and was covered over during a demonstration. “The Objects is Complication” was an attempt see if an “object” could encourage a conversation between administrative staff and students, something which is often lacking in universities and art schools. Me and Kennedy have, throughout this project, been worked with the idea of “objects” as verbs. That is the physical aspect of objecting as part of breaking a trajectory (especially within educational frames, which we see is becoming more and more standardized), and to see if “objects” can function as hinders, hinders as a potential for something new. The “object” made for this exhibition is heavy as it is a cast in copper, and would affect the daily doings of principal Simone Wonnacott.

1. For Heidegger’s tool analogy, see: Martin Heidegger, “The Thing”, ed. Fiona Candin, The Object Reader (In Sight: Visual Culture) 2009
2. To play with this concept we took this definition from the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, a resource that allows any individual to edit a subject from their own point of view. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subject_(philosophy) 23/09/2011
3. http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=object 23/09/2011
4. Bruno Latour, 2.4 The Mediation of the Laboratory “We have never been Modern”, Harvard university press [1993] p.20
5. Bruno Latour “We have never been Modern”, Harvard university press [1993]P.11
6. Bruno Latour “A cautious Prometheus? A few steps toward a philosophy of design (with special attention to Peter Sloterdijk)”, Keynote lecture for the Networks of Design meeting of Design History Society 03/09/2008 www.bruno-latour.fr/articles/article/112-DESIGN-CORNWALL.pdf
7. Martin Heidegger, “The Thing”, ed. Fiona Candin, The Object Reader (In Sight: Visual Culture) 2009
8. See discussion on Modern world in Bruno Latour “We have never been Modern”, Harvard university press [1993] e.g p.32.
9. According to Beatrice Gibson in Celine Condorelli “Support Structures” p.77 “Support is the tragic double of the pre-fix. Support can’t spend time alone with itself but is condemned to existence only in relation to something else.”
10. Annick Bureaud “Art and Weightlessness”, given as a lecture at Jan Van Eyck Academy 2011 www.annickbureaud.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/AIR_Bureaud.pdf
11. Celine Condorelli “Support Structures” p.21 “Support continuously reveals the occurrence of a point of jeopardy and how it causes a rupture in the autonomy of the object”
12. Raymond Williams “When Was Modernism?”, [1987 http://work.colum.edu/~zfurness/theories/williams-when-was-modernism.pdf 23/09/2011 “] ‘Modern’ began to appear as a term more or less synonymous with ‘now’ in the late sixteenth century, and in any case used to mark the period off from medieval and ancient times. In the nineteenth century it began to take on a more favourable and progressive ring”
13. http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=object 23/09/2011
14. There is a large amount of literature surrounding the negative effect of the Bologna Reform within the educational system. See for example Florian Schneider “(Extended) Footnotes On Education”, [2010] http://worker01.e-flux.com/pdf/article_128.pdf 23/09/2011 or Stephan Dillemuth “Old and New Monsters”, [2006] http://www.societyofcontrol.com/pmwiki/k2ao/k2ao.php?n=Main.Dill2MonstersFrieze 23/09/2011
15. Since he began at Konstfack, Jens has been a student representative on the KU board (Konstnärlig Utveckling). The KU board is a deciding committee for Konstfack, consisting of professors from the different departments. It can incredibly heartbreaking to see the progress of errand, as it is slowly passed through and watered down by the administrative system. The brief for this course, that this text is part of, was passed by the KU board after a long meeting earlier this year. As I remember it there was a disagreement around the word essay and its suitability.
16. See glossary in Jacques Ranciére, “The Politics of Aesthetics” 2006 Continuum books London, New York p.89
17. Ibid p.3
18. It also divides “the visible from the invisible, the audible from the inaudible, the sayable from the unsayable” Ibid p.3
19. Raymond Williams “When Was Modernism?” 1987 http://work.colum.edu/~zfurness/theories/williams-when-was-modernism.pdf 23/09/2011
20. Chus Martinez in a lecture at Tensta Konsthall 13/09/2011
21. Jens’ program is called “Art in the Public Realm”) It is a buzzword within art, it sounds great! it implies transparency and democracy. A brief look at the writings about public shows that it is seen not just as property accessible to common people, generally owned by the state or aristocracy, but also as a relational notion, i.e. as an arena where one meets, engages and discusses. ((There are tons of writings on the notion of public including texts by Jürgen Habermas, Alexander Kluge, Ernesto Laclau or Chantal Mouffe. Instead we suggest Simon Sheikh’s essay ”In the Place of the Public Sphere? Or, the World in Fragments” [2004] http://republicart.net/disc/publicum/sheikh03_en.pdf 23/09/2011
22. Ibid.
23. Chantal Mouffe “Articulated Power Relations – Markus Miessen in conversation with Chantal Mouffe” 2002 http://roundtable.kein.org/node/545 23/09/2011. “This is how I envisage the agonistic struggle, a struggle between different interpretations of shared principles, a conflictual consensus: consensus on the principles, disagreement about their interpretation”.
24. Jacques Ranciére “The Politics of Aesthetics” 2006 Continuum books London, New York, “Artistic practices are ‘ways of doing and making’ that intervene in the general distribution of ways of doing and making as well as in the relationships they maintain to modes of beings and forms of visibility.” p.13
25. See Jacques Ranciére “The Emancipated Spectator” Artforum 45:7 March 2007
26. Ibid.
27. Chantal Mouffe “Politics and Passions, the stakes of democracy”, Centre for the Study of Democracy, [2002] “what is important is that conflict does not take the form of antagonism (struggle between enemies) but of agonism (struggle between adversaries).” p.9
28. Chantal Mouffe “Articulated Power Relations – Markus Miessen in conversation with Chantal Mouffe”, [2002] http://roundtable.kein.org/node/545 “The major difference between enemies and adversaries is that adversaries are, so to speak, friendly enemies in the sense that they have got something in common: they share a symbolic space. Therefore there can exist between them what I call a conflictual consensus. They agree on the ethico-political principles that inform the political association but they disagree about the interpretation of those principles” 23/09/2011