User:Lidia.Pereira/Trimesters/RWRM/IIIEssay

Abstract:
Under Construction

INTRODUCTION

Production of creative work of any kind comes often associated with research, both within the technical and the theoretical domains. This is no different from the approach I choose to take when I embark on a new project. Deeply influenced by my belief that neutrality in both art and design is a "burgeosie myth", as put by Roland Barthes, I often atempt to engage critically with the political, economical and cultural surroundings of the media landscape. The all-encompassing concept of ideology, particularly, is a difficult one to escape - otherwise known as "common sense", such designation testifies in favor of its successful representation as universal and of general interest. There's no possibility to talk about new economics within participatory culture without mentioning immaterial labor, and there's no way around class struggles when discussing labor and means of production. The space of the minorities within this so-called participatory culture is once again pervaded by ideological beliefs and stigmas. The friction between digital utopias and embodied realities is evocative of the power social construction represents when considering the subject, whose representation and perception of self are heavily defined by what, in Marxist theory, is called the superstructure. It is these tensions that I aim to further explore through my practice, in a delicate exercise to find balance between romanticist revolutionary naivety and downright disbelief in free will.

PARTICIPATORY CULTURE

On the second chapter of "Bastard Culture" - "Claiming Participation", Mirkos Tobias Schäfer differentiates between cultural participation and participatory culture. Whilst the former is characterized by an intelectual elite deconstruction of cultural artifacts, the latter is imbued with concepts of DIY, prosumerism and action, construction and modification of cultural artifacts, there where software development becomes the "means of production of the digital age". This participation can be, however, explicit and/or implicit. Explicit participation is driven by motivation, varying according to different users' skils. This motivation is not always altruistic of politically charged and users' context varies greatly, such as paid labor, leisure or unpaid voluntary work. Design implemented participation, otherwise known as implicit participation, allows for our leisure time to be commodified in big chunks of data extracted from our interactions and habits online.

My first attempt to encompass general concerns regarding ideology and participatory culture came to be in the form of the Slash News project. Slash News is a browser-based application that generates slash fiction from daily BBC RSS feeds and Harry Potter slash fiction, bringing into play ideas of promiscuity as deeply connected to power structures. As part of my interest towards our participation in culture and how that participation, even when explicit, is monetized implicitly, I tried to reflect on how can that explicit participation remain within the user’s domain. By mimicking the design of the BBC news website in a situationist prank fashion, I both try to make the source more visible and underline the fact that the “new meaning” these generated fictions produce was there all along, just not so transparent.

The paradigm shift of control society to disciplinary society allowed for the birth of the multitude, which does away with the collective identity of the laborer and mutes the political voice of the industrial era masses. Because implicit participation doesn't necessarily require collaboration and communication between users, there's no need for interaction, shared values or common goals. The ideological focus on the individual rather than on the collective presents difficulties to the formation of a political conscience. Not only that, but the political, social and cultural assymetries to be found within the digital multitude midst are an obstacle nearly impossible to transpose. Social media, particularly, benefits from user generated content contributing to information management systems, which can be exploited for improving information retrieval or gathering user information for market research. According to Maurizio Lazzarato, the production of subjects and social relations coincides, then, with economical power. The Immaterial Labor Union was exhibited as the headquarters for a social movement. On a big table there are pamphlets, flyers, stickers and a Metro newspaper with news about the union, as well as a computer where one can visit the movement website. There is also an agenda, a cup with pens and a coffee-maker. On the wall, posters, post-it notes and photos of campaigns can be seen. Once again, there was an interest on my part to continue exploring the possibilities of the situationist "détournement". The Immaterial Labor Union is born out of a desire to shunt from the atomization of the individual into the collective, to think about alternatives to the neoliberal grey area of the multitude and its permanent state of insulation. It refuses the technocratic graphing out of social relationships, the abstraction of the community to a network of edges and vertices carefully mined to more profitably design the subject. The union holds that a true knowledge economy is only worthy of such title when not dependent on power assymetries, and so demands transparency and control over the means of production - our own subjectivation. Making use of deception and other ubiquitous strategies such as the instrumentalization of communities and factorization/machinization of social activity, the neoliberal apparatus has found ways to coopt yet another one of its critiques, labelling our current mode of exploitation under the "social" tag. To put it simply, the immaterial labor union intends to be a space of community reflection around the question: "How not to be seen, yet still be represented?"

THE POSTHUMAN, CYBERFEMINISM, TECHNOFEMINISM

CONCLUSION