Xie xie everyone for coming out under Shanghai's grim weather for urban animal mapping and talking

The Shanghai Urban Fauna Mapping Project: Walk, Workshop, Talk in Shanghai

My Dirt is Matter Out of Place project presented in Montreal's Articule gallery last year, is about to have Shanghai edition: The Shanghai Urban Fauna Mapping Project is a walk, mapping workshop and artist-talk that focuses on mapping the sparrow, the pigeon and the dog of the Chinese megapolis to uncover some of the city's governing ideologies. The event hopes to be a platform to address Shanghai's everyday and current modernization as well as think about present and past urban policies and social paradigms. From Mao's Four Pest Campaign, to the destruction of Shikumen lanes and the 'modernizing' urban plan each animal has its place in this ideological urbanscape.

The Shanghai Urban Fauna Mapping Project is part of K11's public program "Mapping Shanghai," and will occur on April 13th 2014.

3:30pm we will meet at at K11's entrance dome to start the walk. The walk will be semi-guided and last one hour. Maps will be distributed but participants are invited to bring cameras and pencils to map their own animal landmarks.

5pm artist-talk and workshop will be given on B1 of K11. Drinks and sweets will be served!

More info here for Mandarin speakers here: http://www.douban.com/event/21273718/

"Ilha das Flores": A Tomato, Thumbs and Pigs for a Short Explanation of Capitalism

Isle of Flowers (or Ilha das Flores in Portuguese) is a 1989 Brazilian short film by Jorge Furtado. Following a tomato from garden to dump, it delivers dry narration, witty editing and eclectic visuals for an unexpectingly cruel message.

What in the World is Art: An Example from the Field

A few days before the 2012 Whitney Biennial opened, a web page with the museum's logo, template, language and a similar url (www.whitney2012.com instead of www.whitney.com) announced the institution's decision to give up on certain "generous corporate donations" by terminating its partnership with the Deutsche Bank and Sotheby's. According to this release by resigning from such benefits the Whitney was acknowledging and, especially displaying its role in upholding "a system that benefits collectors, trustees, and corporations at the expense of art workers" (I would add art lovers). The Whitney was taking a stance against the Deutsche Bank's corporate conduct (the bank just settled a legal dispute of $202 million for reselling knowingly shaky mortgages between 2007 and 2009) and deploring Sotheby's recent internal policies (the lock-out of its art handlers while making record profits and increasing its director's revenue from $2.4million in 2009 to $10.3 million in cash and benefits in 2011).

The world of art is a weird one that exists through the belief that certain "things" have magical-like forces over us. Often these magical qualities are explained by using intellectual concepts, discussing production prowess or expressing notions of aesthetics, while actually most of these "things with agencies" gain their aura through the tricky powers of financial markets. So for a museum to use its own existence to reveal the inner-workings of this weird cosmology - for instance museums may use artists because their sponsors need to sell things that may gain value if the museum uses this artist's work - was impressive, almost as impressive as good art. That excitement, however, lasted only until I learned the website was a hoax and experienced the Whitney biennial's overall blandness.

If that fake virtual press release was the most creative project to come out of the Biennial, I'm also excited to say that their hoax is part of a series of fake press releases and that their latest has just denounced the Whitney’s recent actual request for donations from blue-chip artists of work valued over $500,000.

Notes from an Ethnography on Post-Modern Labor: Ludo-Capitalism or Computer Feudalism?

Last week the American Anthropological Association kicked off its 109th meeting in Montreal’s Palais des Congrès. As the 5000 speakers shuffled papers and cleared their throats, I was among the happy anthro-devotees going through the 632 page program to decide which panels to attend during the five days: Mobile Phones in Papua New Guinea? Favela Tourism in Pre-Olympic Rio? Breastfeeding in a Time of Post-Feminism? The Aesthetics of Egyptian Political Pop Music Videos? The Soundscape of 9/11's Heritage?... Some panels I wish I attended others I am so glad I did.

For example David Hakken from Indiana University presented his talk “From Labor to Playbor: Business Anthropology In the Time of Social Networking.” As a labor anthropologist he discussed the role – from an evolutionary perspective – of computerization on work. Today, similarly to technology breaking down the traditional lines between the private and public, computers are changing how we work, where we work, why we work and what qualifies as work.

Up till this fall Google had a game - called ESP - to label their gazillion images into categories. This game transformed an intensive, repetitive and certainly costly archiving chore into a fun (addictive) activity resulting in a better Google service, and all this produced by free labor.

Could this virtual collaborative project be the demonstration that surpassing the barriers of face-to-face labour results in better, less costly, and funner systems of efficiency. A sort of Ludocapitalism fuelled by playbor? Or rather is this a form of post-modern Taylorism? A 21st century feudalism – computer feudalism – in which our free bug reports, tweeking of open source projects and fun Google tags feed empires we are never rewarded by?

Leaving the panel I started to think that if technology can enable us to game our way through labor, then workers most probably will start acting like players. It doesn’t seem entirely unlikely that Wall Street traders sell, buy, negotiate and think in a similar fashion to the questing, grinding, hating factions or joining guilds World of Warcraft avatars do.

Both just as removed from the impact of their labor on the ‘real’ world but getting the addictive high of success that industrial Taylorism most probably never provided its workers. 

The Colour of New York's Troubles

In this very very witty and pretty graph by artist Andrew Kuo one can read smart data with a New York City biased twist.

London Riots Then and Now: Different Genre But Both 'Ugly'

Source: The Guardian, British Film Institute