Alex Head was born in London, 1983, and currently works in Berlin, Germany. Head is an artist interested in creating non-hierarchical networks of artists, researchers and citizens. His practice facilitates meetings between artists and non-artists within the communities and micro-communities that populate the artist’s working environment. His work often involves people, discussion and events staged in public. These events then lead to images, narratives and publications.

Thursday, 27 March 2014

OPEN ACCESS at The Substation 27.3 - 27.4

OPEN ACCESS - Scent of the Australian Market Economy
Alex Head 2014

The idea of Open Access which has been adopted from Rebel Cities, David Harvey 2012, has two meanings: as a claim of the right to the city itself - including the atmospheric characteristics, qualities and affects on which a cities reputation may trade, and secondly, as  a reference to the infinite reach of immaterial labour to enter our lives through open access to the internet.

By simulating the market economy as a smell I aim to draw attention to the immaterial, all pervasive nature of contemporary work.























Free-roaming, mobile internet access allows us to better understand what Maurizio Lazzarato first described as immaterial or intellectual labour in the 1970's. In his understanding processes of coding and decoding information - of mentally engaging with the tasks required by a given position, push the parameters of work into the private sphere. Subjectivity itself becomes the raw material of capital. Today immaterial labour has come to characterise work and trade in the digital age with some disturbing implications.

Corporations and big businesses have typically used outsourced, often less unionised forms of labour to find cheaper means of production. For the intellectual labourer the competition that outsourcing represents is infinitely extended by the 24 hour working day that the internet makes possible. Rather than offering flexible, self organised working environments, the labourer is often at the beck and call of deadlines that concurrently span multiple international timezones.

If this form of globalised competition leads to a potentially ceaseless working day, month and lifetime the right to 'eight hours labour, leisure and rest' is frustrated and undone. And, as technology allows us to escape the physical places of intellectual work such as homes, offices and factories, capitalist production becomes present and available every-where.

In an age of indentured participation to the information economy it is once again time to review the dynamics between labour, public space and democracy.

OPEN ACCESS forms part of the exhibition Merchant City at The Substation, Melbourne, AUS.

MERCHANT CITY
27 March- 27 April
Michael Bullock | Zoe Croggon | Laura Delaney | Alex Head | Robbie Rowlands | Nick Selenitsch | Kit Wise

Opening 27 March 6-8pm
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