Information Maintenance as a Practice of Care (2019)

“If information is to be useful over time, something more than preservation is required: it must be carefully maintained. The authors of this paper, all participants in what we call “information maintenance,” came together because of a deep commitment to recasting our work in these terms and infusing it with practices, relationships, and ways of thinking and being that represent a coherent ethic of care.

In this introductory document, we seek to identify both who information maintainers are and who else would be particularly welcome in embracing and supporting information maintenance. We define our key terms of maintenance and care and discuss how they might be practiced, sometimes offering examples to illustrate our points.”

By Amelia Acker, Hillel Arnold, Juliana Castro, Scarlet Galvan, Patricia Hswe, Jessica Meyerson, Bethany Nowviskie, Monique Lassere, Devon Olson, Mark A. Parsons, Andrew Russell, Lee Vinsel, and Dawn J. Wright
Publisher Zenodo, 17 June 2019; corr., 20 June 2019
Creative Commons BY 4.0 International License
29 pages

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Sam Hart, Sarah Hamerman: Secrets at Mediacity Seoul (2018)

“Secrets at Mediacity Seoul traces a genealogy of artworks that examine the secret as an information structure, from the conceptual artworks of the 1960s to works that consider secrecy and encryption in today’s social and technological context. While conceptual art’s logic of dematerialization often undergirded an aesthetic of ‘pure’ information, it led artists from Douglas Huebler and Robert Barry to Mel Ramsden and Sophie Calle to investigate how secrets test the limits of what can be known and seen. But the role of secrets is political as well as epistemological. Works by artists such as Trevor Paglen, Jill Magid, Paolo Cirio and Hayal Pozanti consider how secrets organize the distribution of power, from algorithmic “black boxes” and state classification schemes, to new digital infrastructures built upon cryptographic primitives. Finally, Secrets at Mediacity Seoul looks beyond the catalogue’s documentary role, imagining how it might conceal or encrypt the absent artworks. The Secrets at Mediacity Seoul forms part of the Secrets research and curatorial project (2017-2018), a collaboration between Sarah Hamerman and Sam Hart. ”

Produced for Monoskop’s Exhibition Library in the 2018 Seoul Mediacity Biennale, 6 September–18 November 2018 at the Seoul Museum of Art.

Self-published in collaboration with Monoskop, Amsterdam, August 2018
[20] pages

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Jasper Bernes: The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization (2017)

“A novel account of the relationship between postindustrial capitalism and postmodern culture, this book looks at American poetry and art of the last fifty years in light of the massive changes in people’s working lives. Over the last few decades, we have seen the shift from an economy based on the production of goods to one based on the provision of services, the entry of large numbers of women into the workforce, and the emergence of new digital technologies that have transformed the way people work. The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization argues that art and literature not only reflected the transformation of the workplace but anticipated and may have contributed to it as well, providing some of the terms through which resistance to labor was expressed. As firms continue to tout creativity and to reorganize in response to this resistance, they increasingly rely on models of labor that derive from values and ideas found in the experimental poetry and conceptual art of decades past.”

Publisher Stanford University Press, 2017
Post ’45 series
ISBN 9780804796415, 0804796416
viii+231 pages

Reviews: Stevphen Shukaitis (Marx & Philosophy Review of Books, 2017), Julian Murphet (Affirmations, 2017), Vince Carducci (Public Seminar, 2017).

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