Dark Matter Archives

18 Dark matterGraphic designer and collaborator Dejan Kršić worked with the collective WHW (What,How & for Whom: Ivet C´urlin, Ana Dević, Nataša Ilić, and Sabina Sabolović) to create aseries of pedagogical illustrations exploring the financial and administrative mechanismsof the Eleventh Istanbul Biennial (2009), whose title––What Keeps Mankind Alive?––thegroup took from Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weil’s 1928 production The Threepenny Opera(Die Dreigroschenoper). Image courtesy WHW and Dejan Kršić.employees first had to apply for their temporary positions, which then consisted offolding and refolding piles of t-shirts, and pointlessly offering perfume samples toBiennial visitors. But perhaps it was an innovative mini-conference held recentlyat The New School University organized by artist Trebor Scholz that most clearlyaddressed the gap between theory and practice, virtual and material labor, doingso at least in part by accident. The question posed by the three-day programwas whether or not the Internet is a creative “play ground,” or an electronic“factory,” or perhaps both at the same time. 29 Attended by a predominantlyyouthful, white male audience, the program included sessions described as “theGift of Immaterial Labor,” “Digital Labor and the Body,” and “The EmancipatoryPotential of Play.” The very phrasing of the program’s title—”The Internet asPlayground and Factory”—is perhaps an unintentional reference to Mario Tronti’sfour decade’s old expression “The Social Factory,” in which the regulatory powerof the capitalist market encloses social relations once found exclusively outsidethe workplace. But signs of how the new, networked economy actually extractsvalue from material, living labor unexpectedly bubbled up at the event whenconference participants were confronted by a group of self-defined Cyber Sweat