Dark Matter Archives

20 Dark matterof enterprise culture? Perhaps the Berlin-based art and media collective kleinespostfordistisches Drama (KPD) has pinpointed the difficulty, with their fictional“sociological” documentary about creative industry workers just like themselves.In a series of video interviews they reenacted the mental life of art workers mullingover a set of questions including, “What do you consider a ‘good life’? Shouldcultural producers, as role models for society, join with other social movementsto work towards new forms of globalization?” Based on actual responses, theproject reveals Berlin’s creative workers trapped in their own feeble expectationsabout a “good life.” We watch as they attempt to multitask hour after hour, withlittle or no transition between work and non-work, socializing and networking,or in some cases wakefulness and sleep. It seems the social factory has completelytriumphed, and no doubt the observations from Germany are generalizable to the“cognitariat” in other global cities. The Berlin media collective’s enigmatic namesums up the situation. Roughly translated into English it reads, Small Post-FordistDrama. The group’s operating thesis is amusingly summed up on their webpagethat shows a single, acid-colored photograph of six hip-looking creative workersin a minimal office space posed precisely around an uncluttered worktable. Theimage appears to allude to one of Caravaggio’s late, understated domestic dramas,such as his Supper At Emmaus (second version, 1606) in which a very ordinarylookingChrist quietly announces to several followers he has returned from thegrave. As if to diminish any remaining theatricality still further, the image on thewebsite has been reduced to the size of a postage stamp. 35Still, there are constant stirrings of resistance. Some of which are surprisinglyfamiliar, though rendered in novel ways, and much that takes place not withinthe white cubicles of the art industry, but at the intersection of cognitive labor,precarious employment, and everyday, informal creativity.In 2007 a very different sort of play within a play from that of KPD took placewhen a group of disgruntled Italian IBM workers, supported by UNI GlobalUnion and the national IBM works councils (FIOM, FIM, COBAS nationalunions) carried out the first known job action in Second Life, a 3D virtual realityplatform where players move about as computer generated characters or avatarsin an immersive and interactive virtual world. The striking knowledge workerstook explicit advantage of their dual status as both embodied and immaterial laborwhen they decided to collaborate “creatively” with Internet activists and graphicdesigners involved in Second Life Left Unity (SLLU), an anti-capitalist organizationthat exists only inside the online digital environment. Unionists Christine Revkinand Davide Barillari coordinated the organization of the virtual protest, generatingcolorful striking avatars with pixilated picket signs programmed to stage a24-hour virtual protest against Big Blue in cyberspace. As anticipated, globalmedia coverage was strong, and within a few months IBM capitulated to thedemands of its employees’ local works council, Rappresentanze Sindacali Unitarie