Nicholas Malevé is an artist, software programmer and data activist 
developing multimedia projects and web applications for and with cultural 
organisations, such as Constant. His current research work is focused on cartography,
 information structures, metadata and the means to visually represent them.
 Nicholas presented the concept of access, the connection between artwork and movement, free-software and sharing code, along with explaining GPL (General Public License) and the Creative Commons licenses. We first defined what copyright is, as it makes you decide how you distribute your artistic work, also with others and the way you want to share what you do. One of his recent, collaborative projects, http://academycommons.net/, is a net tool for connecting spaces of research and knowledge production to be used by an open community of researchers beyond bureaucratic or geographic boundaries. Academy commons.net originated from people who have a practice, coming from below, not from top down. A tool with which to collaborate for both students and teachers, it is designed to infiltrate or follow classes when you are not subscribed. It explores a grey zone within the academy, with the position of the ‘free’ student, the guest listener ‘el oyente’ or the ‘l’éleve libré’. It is a website where you can post other events, alternative education of free schools, quite possibly an e-bay of events. Nicholas reflected on the changing the role of the researcher, how can we connect our practice of research, how do we connect with people outside of our faculty? The last part of his lecture was entitled E-traces with a closer inspection of the rapid enclosure of the internet, IP addresses and web 2.0 ideologies. Rather than encouraging re-use, policies are now aimed at protection, restriction and enforcement. It is this shift, and its ensuing consequences that deserve attention and form the basis for reflections on contexts of interpretation and why they matter.

Seda Gürses is a researcher working in the group COSIC/ESAT at the Department of Electrical Engineering in K. U. Leuven, Belgium. Her topics of interest include privacy technologies, participatory design, feminist critique of computer science, and online social networks. Seda elucidated her research on anonymity in technical as well as cultural contexts, the spectrum being anywhere between anonymous communications and anonymous folk songs. She discussed the use of anonymity as a strategy in networked systems like the Internet especially with respect to profiles. What are the different types of anonymity available on the internet, e.g., anonymous communications, database anonymization, anonymous texts, anonymous artefacts? Seda began by introducing Michelle Teran’s work Surveillance Cinema that utilizes CCTV in different cities and spaces by capturing the signals, then projecting them onto public walls. Anonymity is a powerful concept and strategy. It transgresses concepts like authorship, the original, and the origin, presenting itself across important elements of our lives like songs, poems, oral histories, urban legends, conspiracy theories, chain mails. For centuries anonymity has been used by communities to articulate the voice of the collective. Anonymous statements or artifacts, those things that come out of anonymous production, have signified the cultural practices, beliefs and norms of communities past, while enabling a space for future collectives to build. Some contradictions on anonymity range from the fact that it is quite hard to do it, and that it doesn’t actually work. The problem is that any anonymous data can be linked! No data set can be completely anonymized once it disconnects. If you anonymize data, then data protection doesn’t apply, you loose your rights. You become free but have no protection, a paradox. Corporations use anonymity, so it’s hard to make them liable.

Seda then showed us an example of an anonymous artifact, Whose song is this?, a documentary by Adela Peeva. In her search for the true origins of a haunting melody, the filmmaker travels to Turkey, Greece, Macedonia, Albania, Bosnia, Serbia and Bulgaria. The trip is filled with humor, suspense, tragedy and surprise as each country’s citizens passionately claim the song to be their own and can even furnish elaborate histories for its origins. See Seda’s text Pets and their users. The objective of this paper is to show that PETs (Privacy Enhancing Technologies) are indispensable but are short of being the privacy solutions they claim to be.

We traveled through Brussels and in-between our lectures stopped by Wiels Contemporary Art Centre to view the exposition Riffs by Yto Barrada, whose photographs, films, publications, installations and sculptures engage with the peculiar situation of her hometown of Tangier, Morocco. Devrim Bayar, residency curator, was there to greet us and explain their international residency programme. We also visited an expansive survey of the work of Polish sculptor Alina Szapocznikow and Reporter without boundaries, by Annelies Vaneycken, a social design project which reflects the everyday life in Brazilian Favelas through a newspaper, Journal of Unread articles, with these same texts fly posted on walls of the favelas.

Eli Lotar’s photographs from the former La Villete slaughterhouse in Paris (now the site of the post modern La Villete Park), the Black Birds Negro Review and contributions from Jacque Andre Boiffard were all utilized to open up some of Bataille’s ideas and positions on notions of transgression and sacrifice. A brief detour included the still astonishing Une Chien Andelou (1929) by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali, best known for the notorious eye slicing sequence (just in case you are unaware Buñuel did not actually slice Simone Mareuil’s eye, the stunt double was an ox’s head probably from the La Villete slaughter house).

The Afternoon session shifted the scene to the Northeast of England with the work of the seminal British performance artist Stuart Brisley, which poses some distinctive questions of physicality, the archive as our own bodies and those bodies ground within bureaucratic mechanisms that continuously confuse the structure and the archive. Brisely also made a defining work for the Artist Placement Group with The Peter Lee Project. Its focus was to create an archival project aimed at mining not the landscape but the memories and knowledge of the people of the area in order to help find an anchorage in what was already a community coming adrift under the pressures of new economics. Peter Lee was intended as a fresh start for post war mining communities of the Durham coalfields, a new town standing in stark contrast to the old unsanitary Victorian architecture of the North East. The development was troubled from the start when it was found that the ground upon which the proposed high rise flats were to be built was riddled with abandoned mine shafts and tunnels (a situation that beautifully evokes Bataille’s Old Mole the ‘drudging fiend’). The focus of this stage of the Simon’s presentation was Victor Pasmor’s Apollo pavilion (though the name refers to the space program it is coherent with Nietzsche’s dichotomy), an architectural sculpture acting as a bridge connecting two parts of a housing estate. After its completion in the late 1960’s it rapidly became a focus for local discontent, the haunt of cider drinking teens and later smack addicts, its graffiti seemed to resonate with a Bataillian ‘formless’ aesthetic.

This is the same violated landscape where Michael Cain stars in the 1971 version of Get Carter where Carter exacts his brutally sadistic revenge on one of his brothers killers. The final scene of the film ends with Carter/Cain’s assassination, his head moving gently, rocked by the slight waves of coal blackened water, all of which bears uncanny resemblance to the recurrent motief of Stuart Brisley’s Arbeit Macht Frei (1973). In what is probably Brisley’s best known and one of his most powerful works the opening sequence as an extraordinarily visceral and prolonged session of vomiting followed by Beckett-like views of Brisley’s head repeatedly rising and falling below murky water. In both the film and Brisley’s documentation there is a remarkable analogue, intense gaze trying to explore the extraordinary in the most quotidian way that eloquently recalls Batailles: Apollonian order from on high confronted by darker tragic currents that seem to well up out of the earth itself.

The Negotiating Equity presentation at DAI kicked off at 14:00 in the Gang, Arnhem, part of a daylong programme of presentations at DAI-ArtEZ. Daily blog posts from http://spacethefinalfrontier.net from Negotiating Equity participants contextualize the excursion with images and text, presented as hanging scrolls in the space. ‘Chaiwalla’, an itinerant ‘tea service’ on wheels, moved through the installation during the afternoon, serving up Indian tea and conversation whilst distributing postcards with the project’s website: http://negotiatingequity.net.

The past year Negotiating Equity addressed the concept of space and all of its manifold possibilities, investigating experimental and conceptual art practices under physical as well as virtual conditions. Drawing upon a wide range of artistic and art-related practices, some off the radar, undocumented and under-theorized, others representative of art historical paradigms, we examined various exhibition and presentation models along with finding other audiences, virtual or otherwise, implicitly or explicitly challenging dominant regimes of spectatorship all too often considered self-evident.

Drawing from contemporary and historical debates in Social Sciences, Artificial Intelligence, Robotics and Cybercultures, the talk looked at the models and processes of cyborgification to understand new ways by which human-technology interactions and relationships can be explored. Nishant framed the lecture around questions of the body, technology and regulation. With the emergence of pervasive and ubiquitous technologies of computation and communication, cyborgs, once the objects of futuristic writing and academic theorization, have become a part of our everyday life.

From prosthetic implants to virtual appropriations, different models of understanding the cyborgs are now available to us. What does this cyborgification of life, labour and language do to our existing notions of being human? We can break it down into two categories, machine centric and human centric, but not every interaction with technologies is cyborg. Although we are born with human centric technologies, we are becoming cyborgs and they shape the way to be human. According to Nishant, cyborgs subsume reality, allowing you to be more human than is possible. But not every interaction with technology is cyborg. The idea of a techno-social subject questions technology not as paradigms but as tools (gadgets). A cyborg does not talk in society, rather they are alone and unique, at the intersection of society. A cyborg does not look at science but technology. Nishant then gave three examples from Asia where the cyborg has moved on to the techno social and described their intelligibility and incomprehension.

Geoff Cox joined us on Friday for an all-day seminar entitled Strategies for the antisocial web. Presently he is a Researcher in Digital Aesthetics, part of the Digital Urban Living Research Center at Aarhus University (DK). Geoff focused on a range of projects that present critical strategies in response to the paradoxes of social media, its promises and its shortcomings beginning with ‘curating technologies’. Although these platforms facilitate unprecedented levels of sharing, the social relation is arguably produced in restrictive form, as personal and collective exchanges are further commodified.

Drawing on examples from his experience as Associate Curator of Online Projects, Arnolfini, Bristol (UK), he began with ‘Anti-social’ media, as an area of concern using examples from a number of online projects he developed for Arnolfini such as “Repetitionr by Les Liens Invisibles, a petition platform that generates fake signatures. unCraftism is another example within this project organized by Rui Guerra.

Some of his artistic collaborations include Notes Towards the Complete Works of Shakespeare, with cooperation from Elmo, Gum, Heather, Holly, Mistletoe and Rowan, Sulawesi Crested Macaques (Macaca Nigra) from Paignton Zoo Environmental Park (UK). It was produced in response to the familiar idea that if an infinite number of monkeys are given typewriters for an infinite amount of time, they will eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare. It was translated to a computer environment, producing live updates published on the web, alongside a webcam view of the production scene showing the creative activity in its fuller context. Geoff also serves as treasurer of the Museum of Ordure, an on-going collaboration with Stuart Brisely and Adrian Ward that will present its latest project this summer.

‘Coding publicness’ was framed by examples from Anti-thesis.net, which is Geoff’s workspace that maps out his practice, projects and research. The project Data-Browser, in collaboration with Plymouth University, UK and published by Autonomedia, presents critical texts that explore issues at the intersection of culture, technology and society.

These initiatives also relate closely to the work of KURATOR, a research and curatorial platform that has a special interest in the parallels between the ways that objects are assembled in technical systems and in curatorial practices. The symposium organized together with DARE at the beginning of this year in Aarhus, Public Interfaces, is ongoing research around interface criticism, the aim is to broaden issues to encompass the development of urban interfaces, and the changing concept of the ‘public’. Finally, Geoff emphasized how new cultural forms that emerge from coding cultures allow for a reappraisal of the concept of the ‘public’, making it open for further modification and reuse.
Joasia Krysa then joined us in Skype from Plymouth University, UK, where KURATOR is based to explain her past practice at KURATOR which has a particular interest in the emerging discourse and practice that links curating with programming, software and networks. Silicon Dreams: Art, Science & Technology in the European Union focused on the currency for transdisciplinary practice across Science, Technology and Art and was co-ordianted by Joasia. After the net, 3.0 explores the paradoxical development of the Internet by presenting artworks that highlight key developments from cybernetics to free and open source software, and social networking platforms. Joasia then explained the curatorial premise of the forthcoming Documenta 13, in which she will participate as one of the curatorial ‘agents’ and presented some of her research.

At the end of the afternoon we discussed Geoff’s text from 2010, Virtual Suicide as Decisive Political Act. Focusing on social media and the way subjectivity is captured, virtual suicide ‘stands as the stubborn refusal to operate under intolerable conditions of service and affirms the possibility of creative autonomy over work and life.’

Beginning with Rock my Religion (Dan Graham 1984), this film offers a matrix of text, cine-footage and performance, connecting linkages through American history from the arrival of Anne Lee and her Shaker followers in the 18th Century and culminating in the dystopic ecstasy of Patti Smith. During its course Graham forms a compelling hagiographic, theoretical and biographical essay tracing a parallel history of its emergence in the USA via a particularly American sense of ecstasy that for Graham is embodied in rock ‘n’ roll.

AK Films archives of Newsreel Films vintage footage of the Black Panthers protests and rallies ‘What We Want, What We Believe’ Shows newsreel film. ‘Off the Pig’, ‘Mayday’ and ‘Repression’ highlighted not only iconic images of Angela Davis, Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver, but also the role of the Panthers Ten Point Plan, which proposed to tackle issues of poverty and injustice in ghetto neighbourhoods, including the famous pre-school breakfast programme. This footage offers a rare opportunity to see Black Panther protests and the visual and physical iconography of the Black Panther movement in its original context.

‘1+1’ is the Director’s cut of ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ by Jean Luc Godard (1968) an exhilaration of Godard’s political engagement as it turns toward his (so called) Maoist phase. Contemporary with the height of American Black Power movement it creates a remarkable paradoxical picture which concentrates the conflicts inherent in the period, into a remarkable series of tableaux scenes. His lyrical filmic presence interlaces these with reflections of space during the recording of ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ by the Rolling Stones.

In the later part of the 1960′s with the Vietnam war becoming a media phenomenon, sport joined art, music and popular entertainment in a newly politicized arena, in which Black athletes were making their opinions clear. The BBC documentary ‘Black Power Salute’ (Geoff Small 2008) tells the story of the members of the 1968 US Olympic sprint team. Their protest actions in support of the Black Power movement and its agenda was defined by John Carlos and Tommy Smith, in an iconic gesture. During the awards ceremony of their gold and bronze medal for the 200 meter sprint, they raised their clenched fists in a Black Power salute. Almost immediately afterwards they were kicked out of the Olympics, and the film shows the impact of the persecution from the Olympic community and the American establishent in reaction to their radical engagement. Before the days of internet and social media, the Olympic viewership was the greatest the world had ever known of any event and this action became iconic for millions of people around the world.

Taken together in the space of one day, these films developed a complex collage offering a potential for a derive, through memory, theory, politics, iconography, and gesture, whilst opening up an array of possible readings of the space of protest versus the rules of the game (Le Regle du Jeu).

This publication focuses on information production, distribution and reception, which are central points in today’s culture. How to inform without informing is the book’s subtext. There are ways of communicating and applying aesthetics to do this and it is not what a narrative represents but what a narratives transforms or translates to some extent. It could therefore be considered a process of unlearning, to make something new by translating from one context to another. This form of journalism, how it becomes developed and how we see the world at large, is validated through this power.

The book came out of an interest to demand, reframe or reorganise so-called knowledge production, the aesthetics we have in the art world. Information, communication and aesthetics are now at their peaks and there are new modes of journalism through art practices. Art and journalism share some common grounds, within the mass media distribution system there is interaction and cross fertilisation between the two fields as well as in artistic practice. If we do not see a separation between information production, distribution and reception, then these could be two faces of the same approach?

But we need to critically reflect on the means of production.

With journalism you need to make yourself invisible as a photographer, otherwise the image doesn’t make it in paper. When presented with this concept, the art audience differs from the journalistic audience. Journalism provides a view, and is a coded system that speaks for the truth while art provides a view of that view, reflecting back on the first as feedback. Art is a set of activities, can be a lot of things, but it means to question itself and it has to take on board the means that it is using, such as journalism. Artists create a medium which is self-reflexive, coaching viewers to ask questions. Journalism, on the other hand, has more of a dichotomy- I accept or refuse.

Journalism is being aesthetic rather than using aesthetic means.

What Cramerotti means by aesthetics is here defined as the process through which we are open to signals, signs in the diversity of the world, and we convert them to some tangible experience. In other words the process in which we translate signs and symbols into a visual or bodily experience. It is not a state of contemplation, but a state of motion, movement. Journalism does use a tradition of aesthetics, yet being universal somehow, aesthetics disappears because it is ubiquitous. What Cramerotti strives for in his book is the implementation of a different aesthetics, another sort of aesthetic regime if you will, where you highlight the first as such.

This is not to abandon the journalistic trope in art. Rather that artists should be aware that they are using it and to admit using it in a transparent, self-assessing employment of it. For example, during Manifesta8 the discourse became refreshing, especially with the implementation of radio, TV and newspapers to see how they worked and affected the local public. One of the assistant curators, Rian Lozano put it nicely: ‘it’s about making holes in the historical cultural fabric of life.’

By questioning the urgent matter in artists’ work, without forgetting the cultural translation, artists can use mediated channels. We have the necessity to extend the boundaries of art, to expand it, not to keep art within art boundaries. But to go outside of it, though you do compromise your work. It’s not about limitation, it’s about possibilities. And ultimately it’s about being effective. Not just about revealing mass media hegemonic structures, it is rather about expanding the distribution of knowledge in space and time. And it’s about a political answer in artist’s practice. In trying to make sense of the world beyond the journalistic representation within the work, we question fiction (art) as the site of the imagination whilst questioning journalism as the site of reality. Afterwards there was an hour! discussion with the group, citing for instance, the work of Simon Norfolk as an example of Aesthetic Journalism.

For Friday’s seminar we were joined by Florian’s group ‘Re-reading Public Images’ in which some students discussed their projects they had prepared in relation to the Aesthetic Journalism context. Patrícia Sousa’s contribution is pictured here and viewed here.

Countdown.
Four questions on evidence and imagination:

4. By borrowing from forms of news media, what new modes of exhibition practice are artists, curators, and writers enabling to develop cultural relationships between the global relevance to local issues?

3. What challenge or validation is made to artworks through their appearance in an exhibition or on a news channel?

2. Does the use of an investigative methodology within contemporary art practice shift an understanding of truth and subjectivity?

1. Does an integration of art and journalism emancipate art from a closed sphere of discourse allowing it a more social and political dimension?

The nine student participants in Negotiating Equity are now embarking on a two-week voyage to India to collaborate with Srishti School of Art and Design and CEMA (The Centre for Experimental Media Arts). Our first pit stop will be New Delhi with a half-day seminar with Raqs Media Collective and a visit to Khoj, an artist led, alternative space for experimentation and international exchange.

Upon arrival in the IT capital Bangalore, Space The Final Frontier commences, an expansive trans-spatial /trans-local investigation into the notion of ‘space’.

Public space, political space, virtual space, mediated space / the space of media, territorial space, temporal space, inter-subjective space and even perhaps extra-terrestrial space, are departure points. Students, artists, curators, architects, cultural producers, sociologists, algorithm theorists, and urban geographers will embody the practices of collaboration and self-curation, which are central to this participation. Seminars, lectures and interactive events will include technological and aesthetic means of mapping, algorithm theory and reflections on the future of search.

You can follow the developments at the website.

He also discussing gaming, by explaining the two streams: the players or ludologists (etymology and usage taken from Homo Ludens, by Johannes Huizinga) where the most important thing in gaming is the story. On the other hand, narratologists, being aware of the narrator coming into the picture and the role of the narrator. Examples were Molleindustria and their Mcvideogame (2006) and Leakyworld: A Playable theory (2010), one of their most recent project made in 10 days as a contribution to the Wikileaks stories project.

NAPON also organized the exhibition and conference Territories and Resources (2008) that pertained to fields of new economies in the context of virtual territories and resources Web 2.0, where resources here are meant to be the ‘users’. Inspiration was to show where capitalism is performing, on the web. People who are online, working, the time people spend, number of people, is proportional to the value of stock value results in the financialisation of our libido, fulfilling our needs for these things, working for free. But what is the reward? We get attention, we are commenting with people but what else is exchanged? The task of capitalism is to go beyond its borders, go somewhere, expand its growth, territory.

Net art, underground movement along with the critical practice of the hacking culture were exhibited within the gallery space yet some works were exhibited in the public main square, (Trg Slobode) at CONTAINER 001: Alessandro Ludovico (Italy), Paolo Cirio (Italy) with GWEI – Google Will Eat Itself which uses Google ads, and with small hacking, redirect to websites. With that money earned they purchased Google stocks. Amazon Noir, where Alessandro Ludovico, Paolo Cirio and Ubermorgen teamed up, stole copyrighted books from Amazon by using sophisticated robot-perversion technology. Bureau D’Études, is mapping world power, their works a visualization of power and dispositifs. But truth will not set you free. You can read more in the Laboratory Planet. Aristarkh Chernyshev and Alexei Shulgin decided to make art objects because wIth media art you don’t make money. So they invented a project, Electro Boutique, 
or how to create money with ‘Media Art 2.0′. In 1997 Vuk Cosic, hacked the Documenta X website, copied everything and put in on his own website, leading to a whole discourse about stealing the work and website and that the artist is the best place for the speculation of capital.

NAPON’S most recent curatorial project is Wealth of Nations (2010) on Spike Island, Bristol, UK. Taking the title from Adam Smith’s eponymous 1776 thesis in which he proposed that the ‘invisible hand’ of ‘self interest’ would spur economic progress. The show also explores what is money, as a religion: highest concept today, as a belief system. Some works included Kate Rich’s Feral Trade project, Natalie Jermijenko and the Bureau of Inverse technologies with Despondency Index. Ola Pehrson’s project NASDAQ vocal index shows the graphs of companies listed on the NASDAQ transformed into music. Computer software converts the graphs to sheets of music, and the scores are presented online on a projection screen, to be read and sung by a member of a local choir.

In the afternoon Kristian lectured on Superstructural Dependencies. This seminar was based on research conducted for the Impakt festival 2010 in Utrecht entitled Matrix City, curated by Stealth (Ana Džokić & Marc Neelen) and Kristian Lukić. Through the technological superstructure of cities, the fast development of mobile devices and the automation of services, the urban environment is undergoing rapid changes. With Superstructural Dependencies, a discussion is opened on the effect of a state of complete dependency on such an artificial technical (urban) superstructure – not only regarding for instance resources like food, water or energy, but as well other key activities like communication.

MATRIX CITY dealt with issues of controlling the city, how infrastructure systems and internet affect urban daily lives. Inspired partly by Dutch architect Constant New Babylon: 1950-1960 the city of play is a world city, in this sense no hard work, machines are working underground for the people. Some examples of works shown on ecology, environment, speed urbanization, car usage, carbon dioxide emissions and transport. Critcal Art Ensemble addresses gene modification. How did the island of Manhattan look 400 years ago?: Mannahatta Project is now entitled the Welikia Project. Data was gathered and used non-human inhabitants in global cities (beavers, birds, deer). Masdar City, will be the first zero-emissions city in the world is under construction. Masdar headquarters will be the world’s first 0 zero carbon building.

Or what about an underground bunker in the US that becomes used for shelter of the future? Utopian worlds like The Wolf and Nanny by Cliff Evans US, 2009, 6 minutes, are contrasted by works of Zelimir Zilnik, part of Black Wave movement with his portrait on taking in the homeless in 1971 Black Film. For the more arcadian in nature Endless Forest (2006) is where you can meet the one you love using yourself as a deer, scripted with gestures. Kristian ended with a few of his own ‘games’ designed together with Vladan Joler, Eastwood- Real Time strategy group.

‘Ni Haifeng’s practice stems from an interest in cultural systems of return, exchange, language and production. Through mediums of photography, video and installations, Ni explores the simultaneous creation and obliteration of meaning while drawing attention to the cyclical movements of people, products and goods that are often reflective of patterns of colonialism and globalization. Aims to subvert the status quo and counteract preconceived notions of art are, in Ni’s words, an effort towards reaching a ‘zero degree of meaning’. The concept of uselessness, seen in the desire to offset ‘the production of the useful’ that is central to the operative conditions of consumerism and the ‘dominant economic order’, plays a key role within Ni’s practice, lending his works a distinct political and social dimension.’
Pauline J. Yao

On Friday the 14th Haifeng gave a lecture/seminar entitled ‘Para-Production’, in his own words he describes the title and what he means: ‘I am particularly interested in manufacturing, which is, in a proper Marxist perspective, pivotal in the chain of social production. This specific type of production is now disappearing in more advanced countries and economic systems, and its social and economic significance diminishing. As a result, there occurred a global re-configuration of labor division and hence a new set of political economic relationships. China, among other developing countries, thus virtually becomes the collective working-class of global capitalism. These issues brought my attention to the inner mechanism of global production and consumption.’

With the addition of visual materials, some can be scene here and on his website, Haifeng further articulated his practice the past few years with projects in Delft and n Leiden. For one of his latest pieces, manufactured in China, he describes the process as follows: ‘This whole project is centered on the notion of labor, which is a knotting point in the ‘para-production’ of social relations. Here, I intend to place labor outside the economic law of equivalence, in other words, outside the gravitational field of capitalist system. The workers here are not commissioned laborers, but active makers, participants and contributors. The old question from Marx – ‘who is the real worker, the piano maker or the piano player’ still rings aloud; I want the laborers and the artist in this project to be equal makers of ‘Para-Products’. Also the work environment is not that of industrial production-line, but that of traditional individual-based type of production. The choice of old manual-sewing machines attests to this. They serve as witness to, at once, a particular process of para-production, and the absence or loss of individual-based ‘making and doing’ in our everyday life. It is interesting to see how weaving, sewing and tailoring, the oldest forms of production of basic human needs, have evolved into an exorbitant culture of high-consumerism. In this light, the project envisages an alternative value system and an alternative mode of social relations. That might sound a bit utopian.’