White Paper Manifesto (alpha 1.2)
(or On the Aesthetic of Delayed Production and Indefinite Planning)
The following text originally exists as an online public document open for everyone to comment. The text muses on the potential of planning and proposal as an artistic practice and elaborates on the reason these types of practices are befitting to the current times we live in. If you are interested in continuing this conversation, I encourage to add comments, critique, and suggest edits directly to the ongoing document. You can support the White Paper Manifesto and the artists via Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/sheungyiu
Please visit here for the abstract of the text. Let’s keep the conversation going.
This white paper calls for the delaying of art production.
From now on, artwork shall exist as blueprints. It shall take the form of white papers, google docs, grant proposals, mockups, 3D models, webpages, sets of instructions and bullet points in hastily written notes. This artwork, for example, will exist as an ongoing google document, open for comment, ready for further edits, and constantly updated. The idea this white paper describes will be ever-changing, in perpetual influx, never coming into conclusion nor fruition. Art shall cease to be physical or materialized in a physical space as long as the current condition of the world remains unchanged.
Producing art is fundamentally different from practicing art. Practicing art emphasizes the art itself, the artistic idea, and the process that leads to it. Producing art implies a product, (often valuated in a market) and thus situates art-making as a value creation process in the production pipeline, and the role of artists to be primary sector workers in the Culture Industry. Besides the obvious capitalist connotation, art production is underpinned by an obsession with exhibiting art. An established artist must constantly maintain their relevance through participating in museum group shows, art fairs, art festivals, and biennales. Thus, to be a successful artist requires creating (spectacular or inconspicuous) spectacles for consumption. The occupation that once took pride in its freedom, ironically, finds itself to be yet another laborer stuck in a working environment ever more hostile and unstable. The luckier artists spend most of their time producing new work to appease the art market and chasing after international festivals. The less fortunate slave away between freelance work and grant applications to fund the production of artwork created just to have something to show. Both groups are caught up in installing, transporting, framing, and designing. Neither of them really has time to practice what they preach.¹
This is a white paper that calls for the delaying of art production.
White paper instead of white cube. This is a report, a proposal, a plea, a humble suggestion, an elevator pitch to an angel investor, advocating for the art of delayed production. A white paper oscillates between the grandiose statements of manifestos and the boring clauses in corporate annual reports. It appropriates the bureaucratic language of government agencies to speculate on a new mode of doing art. This white paper acknowledges both the functions and the limitations of white space and art objects. The main proposition of this white paper — the end delaying of art production — should not be understood as reactionary irony, nor as a nihilistic remark. Irony always comes from a position of privilege. Rather, it was written with sincerity and the hope that delaying art production will make space for alternative artistic practices that better reflect the current state of the world and the role of an artist. The white paper proposes digital files, mock-ups, prototyping, 3D-modeling, and world-building as the artistic practices par-excellence in a world characterized by the climate crisis, algorithmic abstraction, post-capitalism, institutional failure and quantum science. The new artistic practices prioritize planning over production, archiving rather than exhibiting. By indefinitely delaying the materialization of the artwork, artistic practices can be reimagined outside of the logic of the art market and the cultural industry. Artists can decondition themselves from the set of unspoken rules — that construct an artist’s career — which they have internalized. In the following text, I will briefly summarize my arguments for delayed production in short chapters.
On The Potential of White Paper
Stanford Law School defines a white paper as ‘an authoritative report or guide that often addresses issues and how to solve them.’² White paper is a product of well-intended bureaucracy, aiming to propose solutions to societal challenges. An epitomical example is the Churchill White Paper of 1922, which was drafted to explicate a policy of establishing a national home for Jews in Palestine without subordinating the Arabs indigenous to the territory. History, unfortunately, did not unfold as the white paper had planned; nonetheless, it highlights the speculative and directorial function of white papers. The white paper tradition gave rise to a variety of color-coded literature: green paper denotes a draft proposal and blue paper signifies a technically specific report.
The format was subsequently adopted by the business sector and, most recently, by startup culture. In this setting, White paper loses its previous formality and becomes a marketing tool. Startups use it to elaborate on business models and concepts, with the intention of attracting investors and a wider audience. What used to be an authoritative report to address societal challenges turns into a means to extract value through planning and problem-solving. However, white paper can also be purely speculative literature that transcends self-serving purposes. Such is the case of Satoshi Nakamoto’s infamous white paper titled ‘Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System’.³ Written in the wake of the financial crisis in 2008, the white paper imagined a novel cash system that would later become bitcoin. The short 8-page paper heralded the development of financial decentralization and outlined the mechanism of blockchain technology. Being a digital pdf file, the paper traveled fast and transversed disciplines. It gave rise to new thinking about system organizations beyond the financial sector, that circumvent the failure of traditional institutions, from civic journalism⁴ and social relationships⁵, to sustainable development⁶. These, in turn, give reified structure to pertinent concepts such as object-oriented ontology and non-anthropocentrism. For example, by using cryptocurrency, Terra0 gave a piece of land economic autonomy to trade its resources, thus ‘creat[ing] technologically-augmented ecosystems that are more resilient, and able to act within a predetermined set of rules in the economic sphere as agents in their own right’.⁷
Here, the use of the term white paper is inspired by Nakamoto’s paper and differentiates itself from the corporal and governmental use of the document. It emphasizes the act of proposal, planning, and model-making in the drafting of white paper. It speculates on the potential of white paper as a document AND as a catalyst to initiate change for and beyond the scope of the challenge it seeks to address (as in the case of how the bitcoin paper unexpectedly triggered a chain of new thinking on governance, economic structure, and social organization). White Paper Manifesto reimagined the role of artists and artmaking in a similar manner in which the bitcoin paper proposed a new alternative to the financial structure.
On Unlearning The Logic of Exhibiting
Contemporary art and exhibition are inexplicably intertwined.⁸ And like many other postmodern phenomena, their boundaries blur. They coexist without absolute causal precedence. Physical exhibitions necessitate a presentable product. Empty galleries need something to fill them. Artists after Duchamp continued his project, but have rarely subverted the logic of artmaking with exhibiting as its base. Rather, they transformed the auratic art object into other, newer forms of spectacles, worthy to be displayed in a white space: painting to photography, video art and time-based media (on the wall), sculpture to multi-sensual new media installation (in the room or the yard), and, more recently, virtual reality and pixelated internet memes. Even process-based artists need to set up a working space in a museum, leaving remnants of their work for visitors to scavenge. No matter which medium the artists work on, the general formula is usually the same: art production-exhibition. I would not go as far as to claim that exhibitions have become the goal of all art-making, but the logic of exhibiting has instilled an urge of constant production. Overproduction. Artists continue to make new works in order to have something to show during the next studio visit, to present in the next big biennale, to be acquired at the next art fair, and to be bought in the next art auction.
Exhibiting also spawns the notion of an artist’s career⁹, which in recent years has acquired an entrepreneurial tone. Museum open calls, artist grants, and photo competitions now require artists to present their CVs along with their work, as if candidates are applying for jobs. Among the many items written in the CVs are lists of previous exhibitions. Like working experience, the number of times they have exhibited, the year of the exhibitions, and the institution which hosts the exhibition, qualify their artistic expertise. Along with the practice comes all kinds of archaic hierarchies: professional and amateur, solo and group show, museum and artist collective. To be an Artist, one has to be written into art history; and to be written into art history, one has to have a solo exhibition in a respectable art institution.
While within the art bubble, artists may contest exhibition as a relevant yardstick to judge an artist’s career by or reject the notion of career entirely, the establishment is happy to adopt the idea for their own purposes. Exhibition experience has become a way to prove one’s professionalism when applying for an artist visa. Like it or not, now artists have a career ladder to climb, a ladder with clearly defined goals that begins with small gallery group shows, and ends in museum retrospectives. Artists who produce work and have exhibitions are automatically recognized as professional artists. Artists engaging with non-visual, unspectacular practices without any affiliation to art institutions have a much harder time getting recognition, primarily because their work is hard to show in white spaces and near impossible to sell in the art market.
The effect this logic of exhibiting has on artists resembles the institutionalization of the online creator community brought about by the standardization of view counts and subscriber counts as the measure of success for content creators. Platforms such as YouTube do not need to specify the content they want in order to maximize profit. Through monetization of view counts, the ecosystem adjusts itself. Every time the monetization scheme changes, we see a huge shift in aesthetics and content uploaded on Youtube (most recently in 2017 when Youtube changed its monetization policy to favor longer videos). As the community professionalizes itself based on the logic of the self-serving parameters set by Youtube, the content on the site becomes more monotonous and less creative. The online creator community self-organizes into channels of ASMR, cat videos, vlogs, and prank videos. The loose collection of fantastically weird, amateur, and random videos diminishes and gives ways to expertly-edited, smooth-transitioned videos of professional Youtube influencers.
Every once in a while, a successful Youtube star will migrate to the (more glamorous) TV network, starring in shows and even hosting their own. However, their performances often come as a disappointment both, to the TV viewers, to their old fans, and even to themselves, as if they understand that they are too alternative for the TV industry. Some humor belongs to the Internet.
On Unrealizable Projects and Unexhibitable Ideas
The end of art production does not mean the total abandonment of art, but it does entail a reformulation of the relationship between art and exhibition. If we want to continue indulging ourselves in the discourse of aesthetics, we can discuss how physical exhibition, as a form of exhibiting and a way of collecting, prioritizes traditional art forms over more contemporary and immaterial ones. And despite the good intention of art institutions, such as MoMA¹⁰, New Museum and Kiasma to collect alternative, immaterial forms of art (meme, games and net art), the conventional white spaces are ill-equipped to keep up with the rhizomatic development of art. Virtual reality, for example, is notoriously difficult to exhibit. That difficulty might come from the inherent conflict between the public nature of the exhibition space and the private safe space that VR requires to function well. The aesthetics of museums and galleries can not catch up with the ever more heterogeneous development of contemporary art. Is contemporary art best served in The White Cube in 2020?
On a more ontological level, the current way of organizing exhibitions binds us to a human-oriented space and temporality, which is exactly what many contemporary artists try to challenge and untangle. Therefore, their artistic exploration might not manifest in physical products, let alone exhibiting in a physical space. A product would be counterproductive to a speculative artwork meant to be experienced outside of the white space and beyond the human world. Or put it in another way, physical space is not the functional site of these artworks. In this sense, the science fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin and Ni Kuang can be read not as a narrative, but as a master plan for a new world, a blueprint of installation design. We can stretch the idea even further by imagining an ever-evolving science fiction, or an artwork, that never reaches its final form, as in the case of a simulation.
On Late Capitalism Art-Making
The word realize has two meanings: to ‘make something real’ or to ‘achieve something’. Therefore, according to The Oxford Dictionary, an unrealizable project can mean, one, that the concept itself cannot be made real based on written instructions in the ontological sense; or two, that the artist cannot achieve the project for practical reasons. The traditional way of producing art in the studio is more unrealistic than ever. Few artists have the luxury to work in a studio, let alone feed a group of assistants to produce art. In today’s late-capitalist¹¹ society characterized by slow economic growth, extreme economic inequality, and overconsumption, artists must ask themselves if it still makes sense to produce art with the primary purpose of exhibiting. Is the traditional model of art production detached from our current reality?
Increases in the cost of living and stagnant income growth mean a diminished disposable income all across the board except for the top 1%. Income inequality has spread like a plague — even the middle-class is struggling to pay for their midsize family apartments.¹² Urban living, which was once considered a sign of progress in modern times, is no longer an economically sound option. You cannot afford to make it there, to make it anywhere. Similarly, art production is no longer sustainable for artists, who are busy working multiple freelance assignments to fund their own artistic practice and to pay off art school debt while showing their work for free in return for exposure in friend-organized art festivals. Art production is an artistic activity more privileged than ever, profitable only for art-market favorites whose income is ensured by a network of gallery cartels and rich collectors even before their art is on display.
Art trading remains centralized in the same few cities,¹³ leaving artists who cannot afford to move abroad an empty stomach and a bitter taste in the mouth. The global market ends up only serving a close circle of selected artists. The rich get richer, the poor have to choose between paying rent and framing their work. If they are lucky, their secondary skills help them earn a decent living, but not enough to afford professional production services. Artists have ideas but no access to studio space, production facilities, or humidity-controlled storage. The archaic culture of exhibiting exacerbates the quagmire of life as an artist. Artists are told to produce works and exhibit, in order to jumpstart their ‘career’, but the way the culture industry is organized ensures that they can hardly afford to produce art unless they exploit themselves. A next-level, more insidious kind of hell where you are willingly involved in your own torture.
On Art-Making Amidst Human-Induced Climate Crisis
But art production isn’t only unsustainable for the artists, it is also hell for the environment. The toxic pigments, the photo fixer, the packaging, the courier transport, and the international flights. Capitalist activity is the cause of climate change, and art is not an exception. But the worst of it all may be exhibition installation. The signage, the wall text vinyl, the exhibition maps, catalogs, and the temporary structure are basically single-use disposable trash. Once the exhibition is over, they are hard to reuse and recycle.
Faced with the climate crisis caused by greed and overconsumption, we must hold a more stringent stance when questioning the reason for art production and exhibition. Why produce more? All artists and curators today have a moral obligation to practice this self-interrogation. There is nothing more ironic than a man-made object in an exhibition about The Anthropocene. Why are we printing out online media? What is the need to play video work on gigantic screens? What amount of energy consumption and carbon emission is justifiable during the process of art production? In other words, is contemporary art’s obsession with spectacles justified or is it merely credulously replicating a bygone aesthetic of modern art while exacerbating the climate crisis? ‘Is the art ecosystem willing to talk the talk and walk the walk?’¹⁴
On Appropriating The Bureaucratic Language
The sentiment for delayed production also comes from the corporationalization of art. The art world has become a culture industry. Artists are now art professionals, cultural workers, or working in the arts. Artists are asked to be more entrepreneurial in order to survive the culture industry that adopts the neoliberal world order of start-up culture and social media. ‘Neoliberal individualism individualizes us as isolated economic actors who sink or swim.’¹⁵ The democratization of everything normalizes the inadequacy of institutions, becoming an excuse for the establishment to blame it on the individuals.
Today, art-making is just a small portion of an artist’s duty.¹⁶ Artists need to take up the work that was previously the institution’s responsibility (done by someone with a permanent paid position). On top of self-branding, archiving their work, and networking, artists find themselves drowning in a new kind of work: bureaucracy. Galleries ask for CVs; museums want proposals for Biennale open calls; funding bodies need grant applications; universities demand KPI reports from art professors. Artists never run out of paperwork to justify their own existence, describe their intentions and explain how they are going to implement their work even before the project begins. We are constantly moving but never going anywhere. No. We are constantly producing but never going anywhere.
For artists who cannot afford an assistant or get a flock of free interns to run to them, bureaucracy can be a soul-sucking distraction from art-making. If it seems like the paperwork is inevitable and takes up an immense amount of mental power and time for artists anyway, can we imagine it not merely as a means to an end but an end in and of itself? Can we appropriate the bureaucratic language and take it as our own? Can constant planning be an art form? Startup culture is already taking the lead, selling unrealistic business models sugarcoated with game-changing vision. Art could go one step further by advocating a vision without a profitable model, nor a real outcome. The product does not matter but the startup pitch to angel investors does. Every Adam Neumann needs his Masayoshi Son.¹⁷
On a Metamodern Speculative Form of Art
Delayed production does not claim to be a panacea solution art can offer to climate change and the capitalist art market, nor is it superior to traditional artforms. After all, planning is not carbon-free. To consume data is to consume energy. The server that hosts this google doc is operated by a techno-industrial complex that ultimately runs on capitalist logic. And as has been proven time after time, any tactic to break away from the system will eventually be subsumed by it. The anti-establishment murals of Banksy are ultimately dug up and sold in auctions.¹⁸ Artists need to eat.
The art of delayed production is not one of critique nor of irony. It is metamodern.¹⁹ Metamodern, in the way that Luke Turner defined it, as “the mercurial condition between and beyond irony and sincerity, naivety and knowingness, relativism and truth, optimism and doubt, in pursuit of a plurality of disparate and elusive horizons.’ Just as how Turner characterizes oscillation as the key feature of metamodernism, planning exemplifies the oscillation between pure imagination and corporeal production, between jaded cynicism and fresh-eyed hopefulness.
But maybe the time and space opened up by not producing art would free us some headspace to rethink a new model of art-making that decouples artistic exploration from production and exhibition. Does the act of making emerge from the artist’s desire, or from an imposed obligation inherited from a now-calcified institutional structure? Is there a way for the exhibition-obsessed cultural sector and the capitalist art market to better accommodate new emerging forms of art? Can artists sell and still own a portion of their work, so that they continue to benefit from the speculation of an artwork?²⁰ Can mass distribution be weaponized to counter the capitalist logic of the art market?²¹ Will subscription-based payment (such as Patreon), crypto-economy²² or a gift economy²³ circumvent the order of the art market and support immaterial and processual art? By drifting away from art production, maybe we can then speculate on a value system based on planning, as opposed to producing — the aesthetic of delayed production. Like care, planning is also a decommodified labor.²⁴
Within this context, each exhibition label in Bruce Wilner’s Every Object Label I Designed at The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago 2014–2016 can be reimagined as a proposal of a nonexistent art project, thus as stand-alone works of art, that are perhaps more relevant to our time than the real artwork in the museum.
Or, we can take a hint from Cinthia Marcelle’s Legendaries, in which she shows the labor processes and bureaucracy at work in cultural institutions: the cocktail parties, the e-mail correspondence, the group photos, the contracts. Framing the act of planning and the documents themselves as artwork.
Maybe living without a body, art can fully embrace the network culture. Like how Sheida Soleimani laments the death of Reyhaneh Jabbari through a series of text and images organized within a nested folder structure. Compressed into a zip file, propagated and downloaded, shared and forwarded, through hyperlinks.
On The Post-Internet Milieu and Hyperreality We Live In
Delayed production is the artists’ metagame. The term metagame is used among gamers when referring to any approach to a game that transcends or operates, outside of the prescribed rules of the game. In MOBA games, sometimes the key to winning is not being the best tank in pushing a lane, but surprising your enemy with unconventional playing style. You play a healing character like an attacker; you push a lane that is much easier for a mage to take over. In other words, you outsmart a game by refusing to adhere to conventions while staying within its framework.²⁵
The notion of metagame is symptomatic of the operational logic of our contemporary world, one that is increasingly abstract, one where simple causality is flipped over and imploded into itself. Society is organized by money, not by human needs. Demands are generated and not met. The stock market speculates on derivatives, not productivity. Investors pour money into hyped startups,²⁶ not viable business models. Events are created to be photographed, not experienced. Personalized parametrics dictate the information we see online. The economy and nation-states are abandoning the real, but has art caught on? Or, does it seem like while artists and curators are busy cooking up a spectacle, art has lost track of its vision?
Delayed production just makes sense, as an ideology and as a practice. It is reflective of the current time we live in. When biennale²⁷ are explicitly looking into the possibility of curating by machines and experimenting with data as the curatorial principle, who are the paintings, sculptures, and photographs for? Machines will be reading your proposal, scanning for keywords. What matters are the pitches, the proposals and the keywords you put in the white paper, not the materialized outcome.
Delayed production is not a provocation but an enthusiastic attempt to put a name to the natural evolution of art that had already begun (way before this white paper, under the name of net.art, institutional critique, and feminist practice²⁸)²⁹. ‘Everything is good but nothing makes a difference’.³⁰ Art needs to rethink production. The production of the real no longer serves the artist, the intellectual discourse, or the environment. Rather, white paper, VR, mock-up, layout design, and 3D modeling software are more fitting alternatives for the hyperreal world. They are a precarious struggle to navigate a reality characterized by climate crisis, bureaucracy in art, and extreme economic disparity. They are art forms that take our network culture as the background truth and hyperlinks as THE organizational infrastructure. They take advantage of the current technology that enables any material idea to be computationally planned up until the moment of fabrication. They take notes from Cody Wilson, the American crypto-anarchist who uploads blueprints for 3d-printed guns online. Artists should provide the building instructions, the rest is delayed until further notice.
Footnotes
¹ As Hito Steyerl puts it, ‘Art is an occupation in that it keeps people busy — spectators and many others’.
Hito Steyerl, ‘Art as Occupation: Claims for an Autonomy of Life’, e-flux Journal #30 (December, 2011).
² Policy Papers and Policy Analysis, https://www-cdn.law.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Definitions-of-White-Papers-Briefing-Books-Memos-2.pdf
³ Satoshi Nakamoto, ‘Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System’, Bitcoin.Org, (2008), https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf.
⁴ Civic, https://www.civic.com/wallet/.
⁵ ReUnion Network, https://www.reunionnetwork.org/.
⁶ Terra0, https://terra0.org/.
⁷ Ibid.
⁸ The whole history of modern art can be thought of as an extensive catalogue of exhibitions and participating artists, from Salon de Paris to gallery shows to MoMA to biennales to art fairs…
⁹ One can think about, for example, the significance of Salon de Paris to artist’s career in France in the sixteenth and seventeenth century.
¹⁰ MoMA acquired video games and emoji in 2012 and 2016, respectively.
¹¹ Late capitalism, in its current usage, is a catchall phrase for the indignities and absurdities of our contemporary economy, with its yawning inequality, and super-powered corporations, and shrinking middle class. A German economist named Werner Sombart seems to have been the first to use it around the turn of the 20th century, with a Marxist theorist and activist named Ernest Mandel popularizing it a half-century later. For Mandel, late capitalism denoted the economic period that started with the end of World War II and ended in the early 1970s, a time that saw the rise of multinational corporations, mass communication, and international finance.
Annie Lowrey, ‘Why the Phrase ‘Late Capitalism’ Is Suddenly Everywhere’, The Atlantic, (May, 2017), https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/05/late-capitalism/524943/.
¹² This is more of a figure of speech to highlight the phenomenon that, for example, middle-class families in the U.S. are struggling with financial insecurity despite a long economic boom. It is one of the many symptoms of late-capitalism and the ever more uneven distribution of wealth.
¹³ Survey of the global art market has shown that art sales remain centralized in mostly the global north and western European cities such as New York, London, Miami, Venice, Paris, and Berlin.
‘The 15 Most Influential Art World Cities of 2015’, Artsy, 15 December 2015, https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-contemporary-art-s-most-influential-cities.
¹⁴ Ecocore & Kimmo Modig, ‘The Carbon Footprint of the Art World’, DIS magazine: The Disaster Issue (October, 2014), http://dismagazine.com/dystopia/67560/the-carbon-footprint-of-the-artworld/.
¹⁵ The quote is taken from Holly Herndon’s twitter essay on AI and interdependence music, which I think succinctly describes the neoliberal world order.
@hollyherndon, ‘#Ok y’all @grimezsz @zolajesus here is my 2c on AI and Interdependent music’, Twitter essay, 27 November 2019, 12:31 AM, https://twitter.com/hollyherndon/status/1199455651170263040?s=20.
¹⁶ To quote Hito Steyerl, ‘The example of the artist as creative polymath now serves as a role model (or excuse) to legitimate the universalization of professional dilettantism and overexertion in order to save money on specialized labor’.
Hito Steyerl, ‘Art as Occupation: Claims for an Autonomy of Life’, e-flux Journal #30 (December, 2011)
¹⁷ Here I am referring to the curious case of the rise and fall of Wework.
The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Wework, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2LwIiKhczo.
¹⁸ Melena Ryzik. ‘Another Banksy Mural to Go From Wall to Auction.’, The New York Times, 13 August 2013, www.nytimes.com/2013/08/14/arts/design/another-banksy-mural-to-go-from-wall-to-auction.html?auth=login-facebook&login=facebook.
¹⁹ The use of the term metamodern refers to Luke Turner’s ‘Metamodern Manifesto’, ‘We should embrace the scientific-poetic synthesis and informed naivety of magical realism’.
Luke Turner, Metamodern Manifesto, 2011, http://www.metamodernism.org/.
²⁰ Seth Siegelaub, ‘In Preparation For ‘The Artist’s Reserved Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement’, 1970.
²¹ Seth Price, ‘Dispersion’, self-published, 2002.
²² Or a decentralized economic system based on blockchain technology.
VooGlue, ‘How The Decentralization Movement Will Change The Art World’, Medium, January 2018, https://medium.com/@vooglue/how-the-decentralization-movement-will-change-the-art-world-a1309b620a7f.
²³ And other post-capitalist speculation such as collaborative commons.
cjdew, ‘Post-Capitalism: Rise of The Collaborative Commons’, Medium, Match 2015, https://medium.com/basic-income/post-capitalism-rise-of-the-collaborative-commons-62b0160a7048.
²⁴ Leigh Claire La Berge, ‘Wages against Artwork: Decommodified Labor and the Claims of Socially Engaged Art’, Duke University Press, (2019): p8.
²⁵ Go master Lee Se-dol won against AI with a move that has now been dubbed Move 78. The Chinese commentator called it the ‘hand of god’. This unexpected move seemed to be a surprise to AlphaGo, who responded with a weak counter
²⁶ Regarding the hyperreality and the hype economy, one can also think about the saga of Fyre Festival.
²⁷ I am referring to The Next Biennial Should Be Curated by a Machine, the online curatorial experiment to be launched at Liverpool Biennial 2020. It is co-commissioned by Liverpool Biennial and The Whitney Museum of American Art for its online gallery space artport.
²⁸ For example, a refusal to work.
²⁹ And still further back in art history, the role of artists as planners in the classical studio system. One can argued that delayed production is just adopting the classic role of planning without the materialization.
‘Art and Value: Interview with Dave Beech’, Historical Materialism, 2017, http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/interviews/art-and-value.
³⁰ Referring to the title of a review of The Whitney Biennale in The Art Newspaper.
Linda Vablonsky, ‘Everything is good at the Whitney Biennial but nothing makes a difference’, The Art Newspaper, 14 May 2019, https://www.theartnewspaper.com/review/whitney-biennial-2019.
Sheung Yiu is a Hong-Kong-born, image-centered artist and independent researcher, based in Helsinki. His research interests concern the increasing complexity and agency of computer-generated imagery (CGI) in contemporary digital culture. Investigating cultural ideas and technical apparatuses beyond the pictorial surface, he problematizes the representational understanding of photography. He seeks to expand its ontology by formulating the connections between photography theories and new forms of realism, object-oriented ontology, cybernetics, computational theory, and post-internet thinking. Engaging with artistic practice and multi-disciplinary collaboration as a mode of research, his works examine the production, aesthetics, poetics, and politics of CGI, such as computer vision, photogrammetry, remote sensing, and computer simulation. You can support the White Paper Manifesto and the artists via Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/sheungyiu.
