Most of our projects start with a question.
Here are three we recently tried to answer.
What does it cost to be an artist today?
For its bi-annual print publication WePresent asked me to find out what the financial, mental and emotional costs of being an artist are today. An impossible question to answer... but I tried nonetheless.
I spoke to artists, architects, music labels and art collectives to understand how they balance the tension between creating art and participating in the market that assigns value to it; be it through money, attention, grants or other means that can sustain a creative practice today.
The full essay is available online and in print at selected stores.
What are new models for ownership and interdependence?
As part of our collaboration with Serpentine Gallery's R&D program and together with RadicalXChange we've helped bring Beyond Cultures of Ownership to life; a platform and community for emergent strategies for interdependence through art and culture.
120 artists, activists, technologies and researchers came together at London's Somerset House on November 3, 2023, to explore ‘ownership’ as one of the underlying (and surprisingly under-examined) power dynamics of our times.
Following the event we published an Open Call for New Models for Interdependence and Ownership in Art and Culture, out of which three projects will receive £3000 to further develop and publish their ideas. The deadline is 20 December if you'd like to submit your idea.
Somewhen last year, Sari Azout and I started to work on the idea of a publication for Sublime, the knowledge curation platform Sari co-founded. Together with a crew of researchers we brainstormed for several months, started a collaborative research cycle and started writing.
Anna Dorothea Ker, the writer and editor who co-created our Post-Social Media report, and Conor Delahunty, a designer who I met at an Ian Cheng exhibition at Pilar Corrias gallery in London, then created Can You Imagine? – a 99 page print publication that explores new imaginaries for the web.
I contributed an interview with Yancey Strickler, the founder of Metalabel and Kickstarter. I've admired Yancey's thoughtful approach to networked creativity for a long time, so it was a special moment to "be emo about the internet" together. You can read an excerpt of the conversation via the link below.
All of the projects above are the result of collaborative research which we engage in as a team. If you want to learn more about our process, check out this recipe in the Collaboration Cookbook.
