Start-up art

Start-up art is a curatorial, art historical term designating art that appropriates, adopts and repurposes the discourses, operation modes, strategies and look-and-feel of the entrepreneurial start-up culture, including but not limited to product design, business operations, financing, PR activities, advertising, marketing and sales.

Works are presented often in the form of a fictional company, or actual registered company, and its various attributed activities, ranging from a webpage or a crowdfunding campaign, through outdoor advertising to actual business transactions and financial operations.

The term does not apply to artists working in traditional media, who simply turned their production into a business operation, but the operation per se is not part of the artworks presented.

Examples

• Pure Human by Tina Gorjanc, 2016 - a multifaceted project involving a UK patent application, company logo and visual standards, laboratory work with cloned human tissue, product design, product samples, product photography and advertising copy

• Cellout.me by Jeroen van Loon, 2015 - not a start-up or company: the artist is selling his DNA sequence in an online auction. The presentation comprises of the website cellout.me, the artist's actual, full, scientifically sourced genome sequence (380 GB of data), and a gallery installation (sculptural object with computer and screen, displaying scrolling data)

• SOMA by Ivana Bašić, 2014-work-in-progress - company name, mission statement, two products: Ivana Basic®, a static 3D model of the artist, and Ivana Dynamic®, a rigged and posed 3D model of the artist (to be used in renders, or with real-time 3D platforms, respectively), product descriptions and promotional visuals

• Loophole for All by Paolo Cirio, 2013 - a global performance staged as an elaborate, faux, finance-world scam operation: The artist was, through website Loophole4All.com, selling openly forged Certificate of Incorporation documents of 200000 real, anonymous, Cayman Islands-registered offshore companies, whose names he uncovered. The act and punchline of the performance was built on the assumption, that the real owners of these companies, presumably involved in shady financial operations, would have their hands tied and would be afraid to publicly claim ownership of their company.

• Everlandia by Martin Bricelj Baraga, 2005-2007 - A fictional-only travel agency, limited realisation: company name, logo, mission statement and an online interactive graphical application.

• Mindbending Software Inc. by codenerror (Florian Berger, Robert Praxmarer), 2005 - a company developing and selling software, that inserts subliminal messages into games running on a PC, and enables parents to psychologically condition their children, while they are playing "mindless" computer games. The project includes a fully functioning system-level driver that intercepts the OpenGL 3D rendering process on a PC and superimposes custom designed imagery, in subliminal fashion, over popular games like Unreal Tournament 2004. The presentation comprises of the company website, logo, mission statement, a range of specific deployable content (packaged as distinctive products, with trademarks, usage descriptions, advertising visuals, expert reviews and customer testimonials), and a working internet shopping cart.

• Google Will Eat Itself (GWEI) by Paolo Cirio, Alessandro Ludovico and ubermorgen, 2005 - an elaborate performance, comprising of (actually registered) GTTP Ltd. company; a network of software bots that automatically clicked on banner ads placed on a network of hidden websites; an “AdSense” contract with Google, that generated actual revenue from the botnet's activity; the money from the scheme was used to buy Google shares for GTTP Ltd., with the aim to distribute them to everyone, and consequentially to turn Google into a public company.

Pages

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The term has been first coined by this entry on monoskop.org on 17th August 2016.