Developed with Jeremy Bailey, UKS and the Moving Museum
Residency dates:
21 May - 21 June 2017
PRAKSIS, Unge Kunstneres Samfund (UKS) and The Moving Museum are joining forces to host artist Jeremy Bailey (CA), convener of PRAKSIS's upcoming residency The Artist Entrepreneur.
Bailey's agenda will focus on urgent issues for artists working under present-day capitalism. The average artist’s yearly earnings from art practice are estimated at less than $10,000 US dollars, and thanks to widespread public defunding of the arts, makers and galleries face mounting pressure to “innovate or die”. Emerging from this crisis is the seductive but problematic image of the Artist Entrepreneur, a creative entropic force, leveraging the tools of startup culture and capital to self-disrupt and innovate new models of artistic production. Should artists embrace, subvert or actively resist this new identity? What does it risk?
PRAKSIS residents and invited specialists will join forces with Famous New Media artist Jeremy Bailey in Oslo for its month-long summer residency. Their self-appointed collective task: to script a new manifesto for artists working in this era of increased uncertainty. Nothing less than the future of art is stake. Supporting them will be expert mentors from some of the world’s most innovative culture and business startups, including:
Nora O'Murchu — curator of Resonate 2017, O’Murchu is a lecturer, researcher and curator at the Interaction Design Centre in the University of Limerick. She has a degree in Electronic and Computer Engineering from NuiGalway and received her Masters in Interactive Media from the University of Limerick in 2008.
Jason Huff — lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Huff is currently a Director of Product Design at Etsy, where he leads a team of designers and design managers to build awesome products for millions of creative entrepreneurs around the world. His artwork has been shown internationally and written about in Dazed Digital, the Daily Dot and The New Yorker. His projects, published by a specialist press in Vienna, are included in the Library of the Printed Web.
Stephanie Pereira — Director of Creator Engagement at Kickstarter. Pereira trained as an artist and arts administrator. After a decade supporting artists in the nonprofit arts sector, most recently at Eyebeam Art + Technology Center, she joined Kickstarter in 2011 as Director of the Art Program.
Marisa Olson — working with performance, video, net art, sound, painting/drawing and installation, Olson addresses the cultural history of technology, experiences of gender, and the politics of participation within pop culture. Her work has been presented by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New Museum, the Venice Biennale, Tate Modern, Tate Liverpool, Performa Biennial and elsewhere. She is a founding member of the Nasty Nets "internet surf club", as featured at Sundance Film Festival. She is a former Editor for Rhizome and Camerawork and has curated projects at the New Museum, Guggenheim, SFMOMA, White Columns, and Artists Space.
Moritz Philip Recke — a passionate and empathetic entrepreneur with a background in engineering and experience in management, business development and change management within corporate culture contexts, Recke previously worked as an independent mobile app developer, in various positions in the advertising industry and as an executive manager within a multichannel publishing group in Hamburg. For more information see moritzrecke.com
Silvio Lorusso — Rotterdam-based artist, designer, and researcher Lorusso is currently investigating relationships between entrepreneurship and precarity: the entreprecariat. His work has been presented at Transmediale (DE), Vögele Kultur Zentrum (CH), NRW-Forum (DE), MoneyLab (NL), Impakt (NL), Sight & Sound (CA), Adhocracy (GR), Biennale Architettura (IT). He holds a Ph.D. in Design Sciences from the School of Doctorate Studies – IUAV University of Venice. His writing has appeared in the Immaterial Labour Union Zine, Prismo, Printed Web 3, Metropolis M, Progetto Grafico, Digicult, Diid, and Doppiozero. Currently, he is an affiliated researcher at the Institute of Network Cultures of Amsterdam and he works as a mentor at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences’ PublishingLab.
About Jeremy Bailey
Self-styled “Famous New Media Artist” Jeremy Bailey’s inventive and endearingly self-deflating performance practice collides the vulnerabilities and embarrassments of physical embodiment with the tricks of internet marketing and digital imaging’s sleek pictographics; his related research ranges widely over the economic, political and technological issues facing artists today. His work has featured in an international roster of venues and festivals, including the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Tate Liverpool; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Transmediale, Berlin; Museums Quartier, Vienna; and the New Museum, New York. Via his project The You Museum (2015-ongoing), Bailey’s displays – individually tailored to suit the viewer’s personal tastes – can be accessed globally online: see here.
About the Collaborators
UKS is a national membership organization and an exhibition space for contemporary art. Established in 1921, UKS works for the economical and social rights of artists.
The Moving Museum is a nomadic incubator for artists, ideas and cities. It is a large-scale, immersive project that manifests in a new place every time.
The Residents
Jeremy Bailey and the PRAKSIS team selected ten applicants to work alongside Bailey through the month-long residency: Brandon Covington Sam-Sumana (US), Esra Duzen Sandemose (TR), Sebastian Makonnen Kjølaas & Siri Hjorth (NO), Kirsty Kross (AU), Magnus Myrtveit (NO), Shameer Nyland Kinniya (NO), Ruben Steinum (NO) and Tough Guy Mountain (CA).
Events
From the Residency
Team building away day
A "ice-breaker" trip to Hoved Øya: introductions, discussion, setting the residency agendas.
Meet the Residents
In Meet the residents events, residency participants briefly introduce their individual practices and perspectives, followed by open discussion about their work and the themes of the residency.
Reading group
Two critical reading groups focused on Astra Taylor’s The People's Platform and Anthony Dunne’s Speculative Everything.
Empathy & asking open questions: A workshop with artist & Etsy design director Jason Huff
Over two sessions, Jason Huff delivered a workshop training residents to be aware of their assumptions, and to challenge preconceptions through the framing of open questions and the assembly of unbiased data.
Q&A discussion with Johan Brand, founder of Kahoot!
Drawing on his background as an artist and entrepreneur, Johan Brand spoke about his motivations and approach, followed by Q&A and group discussion.
Remote mentoring from Moritz Philip Recke & Stephanie Pereira
Moritz Philip Recke (Entrepreneur) spoke to the group about start-up culture and the dangers of venture capital. Stephanie Pereira (Director of Creator Engagement at Kickstarter) introduced approaches to marketing and raising funds.
Jeremy Bailey’s performative Smoke test launch
This performative event launched The Moving Museum Anthologies Issue II: Lean Artist Smoke Test, edited by Jeremy Bailey. The launch, organised as a “smoke test” marketing webinar, presented products conceived for the social good by artists Claudia Lomoschitz, Post Religion, Kathia Von Roth, and Yinan Song. Speculative products included a marshmallow alternative to firearms, a matchmaking app for creative collaboration and a condom-like private web browser you can share with a friend so they practice “safe browsing.”
Group Crits
The group presented their work in two group critiques: collective discussion and development of work and ideas.
Silvio Lorusso presents
Silvio Lorusso gave a performative introduction to his research into the entreprecariat, mapping the precarious position of today's worker and its legitimation through the concept and discourse of entrepreneurship.
Jeremy Bailey artist talk at UKS
Bailey’s performative talk offered a special insight into his disarmingly funny and profoundly knowledgeable art practice, probing the gaps between lived, embodied experience and the ideologies and rhetorics of the digital domain.
Group meetings with curatorial staff from Astrup Fearnely museum & Akershus Kunstsenter
Staff from Astrup Fearnley Museum and Akershus Kunstsenter generously hosted residency visits, discussing issues at the core of the residency and within each participant’s practice.
The Artist Entrepreneur Seminar
PRAKSIS's director Nicholas Jones chaired a discussion between panellists Jeremy Bailey (artist), Nora O'Murchu (lecturer, researcher and curator at the Interaction Design Centre in the University of Limerick) and Ruben Steinum (Chair of the Board, UKS). Their foci: the possibiilties and strategies open to artists in the face of mounting pressure to adopt entrepreneurial approaches, and the consequences of this trend internationally and in Norway.
Two-day design sprint
Jeremy Bailey and Nora O Murchú led a two-day startup-style design sprint during which the residents pursued product solutions for problems they have confronted as artists.
Manifexpo - The entrepreneurial outcomes exhibition at Akademirommet
Hosted at Akademirommet, this one-night-only exhibition enacted ideas and prototypes produced during the design sprint, with viewers giving feedback on exhibited works. Residents framed concluding ideas on the residency's excavation of capitalism, post-capitalism and (im)plausible utopias.
Associated resources
Reading
Monica Byrne, How do artists make a living? An ongoing, almost impossible quest
Clayton Christiensen, Competing against luck: the story of innovation
Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction and Social Dreaming
Victoria Ivanova, Contemporary art and financialization: Two approaches
Alan Klement, When Coffee and Kale Compete
Jonathan Lukens, Speculative Design and Technological Fluency
Don Norman, The Design of Everyday Things
Eric Ries, The Lean Startup
Trebor Scholz, Uberworked and Underpaid: How Workers Are Disrupting the Digital Economy
Upton Sinclair, The Jungle
Astra Taylor, The People’s Platform, Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age
Video
Dave Grey, Liminal thinking, The pyramid of belief
Darius Kazemi, Tiny Subversions
Keiichi Matsuda, Hyper-Reality
Wilson Miner, When We Build
Evgeny Morozov, Against Solutionism
