User:Kul/Projects are bad for me!

Project Punchline

Deadline 18 November 2050375826458789467430566054783063058746t57834307506026465566699887778900909908889209482984327357345743891732-7821-372-10XXVXXViii

What do you want your first project to be?

Fun, has always been more than fun; it has always been an economic relation.

Over the next few months I intend to develop an interactive "platform" where users would be able/obliged to engage in the awkward, absurd but mostly, oppressive "game" with their devices. In order to reach this final stage of the project I am recently researching ideological and technical aspects of the suitable code creation. The nature of the code that I have in mind could be characterised by unbearably hesitant, unproductive, subjective and most probably alcoholic traits...or at least a quasi-marxist nature. All my intellectual effort is going to be conducted in order to investigate the idea of productivity and unproductivity in the context of western/ innovative/ neoliberal society. As Alexander R. Galloway states, it is impossible to differentiate cleanly between nonproductive leisure activity existing within the sphere of play and productive activity existing within the field of the workplace. I am planning to approach this theme from various angles: economic, semiotic, social and fatalistically existential.

How do you plan to make it?

In order to develop a double-meaning chatting system (productive at the surface but resistant underneath)I am planing to follow the conceptual schema mentioned below:

• Western neoliberal society= the Solitaire Card Games on your desktop
• Innovative society=squeezing the surplus form the trash, pop, and stupor
• Cognitive surplus=smoking but not inhaling
• Coercive laws of completion=the biggest chocolate cake on your Facebook wall
• Code= naturalisation and fragmentation of ideology
• Code = barriers of ideology
• Ideology= set of user-(un)friendly values
• Ideology= a military entertainment / PLAYBOR
• Playbor=fun factory for an intellectually unemployed, freed teddy bear
• Teddy bear=no-collar tiger!
• Code=FUN FACTORY, CHARCH, SUPERMARKET
• Technology= fantasy and terror of NON WORKING >Time management
• Moments=element$ of profit
• Code =ahistorical map of meaning
• Code =apparently transparent & neutral value generator
• Code=denial of death/negation of an animal spirit
• User=product=commodity = bearer of value
• User in motion=temporality of value
• Value = useful, wanted, desirable schizophrenia
• Symbolic x value = x passed in the process of user exchange
• x = a hot potato
• Symbolic zero value =empty floating signifier
• Communication=the release of prisoners (parole)

Why?

I myself am sadly stricken with anxiety of participating in the value production system I do not quite understand.

Who can help and how?

All of the tutors seem to be quite competent, therefor I promise to book tutorials and ask members of staff questions related specifically to my project. I also promise to share knowledge with your peers.

What are you working on now?

Re-configuring my brain and composing some unholy algorithms.

Relation to previous practice

In my previous (and present, I believe) art practice I investigate the mechanisms of regular communications that, under the pretense of functionality or entertainment, conceal the order of power created during the constitution of such mechanisms. I am particularly interested in the nonviolent mode of system's operation that makes collectively cultivated semantic structures unattainable and often discriminative for their own users. In my previous works I have adopted the aesthetic of programming languages or encoded data to depersonalise the written statement or bring many different voices into the narrative line in order to expose the difficulty of entering the seemingly democratic space of language. Some of my performances have been based on absurdist re- interpretation of already established systems of directives, while others propose new systems of instructions for the performer and the audience to follow. I still remain faithful to the idea the action of deliberately confusing the natural language with the formal constructed language in order to communicate instructions both to the user and to the machine.

Showing an awareness of a broader context

• Good old Fluxus (Fluxus is an attitude!),
• The Situationist Int. (Détournement, the construction of situations and a devastating critique of technological efficiency of advanced capitalism)
• Monty Python (absurd and genius)
• and Karl Marx (...because he wasn't a real Marxist!)
• elizabot
• Game, Game, Game and again Game
• TOC

References

• Fun is a Battlefield : Software between Enjoyment and Obsession, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Andrew Lison
• Digital Labour The internet as Playground and Factory, Trebor Scholz, Tiziana Terranova, Alexander Galloway, Jonathan Beller, McKenzie Wark
• The Interface Effect, Alexander R. Galloway.