Minor Compositions is launching a workers’ inquiry into the shaping of
creative, cultural, and artistic labor in the metropolis.
We are currently searching for accomplices and comrades to take part and
further develop this investigation. Description and more information below.
Cheers,
Stevphen
The Metropolitan Factory
making a living as a creative worker
Website: http://metropolitanfactory.wordpress.com
Short survey on creative labor here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/97K8BNK
Surviving as a cultural or artistic worker in the city has never been
easy. Creative workers find themselves celebrated as engines of economic
growth, economic recovery and urban revitalization even as the
conditions for our continued survival becomes more precarious. How can
you make a living today in such a situation? That is, how to hold
together the demands of paying the rent and bills while managing all the
tasks necessary to support one’s practice? How to manage the tensions
between creating spaces for creativity and imagination while working
through the constraints posed by economic conditions?
In a more traditional workplace it is generally easy to distinguish
between those who planned and managed the labor process and those who
were involved in its executions: between the managers and the managed.
For creative workers these distinctions become increasingly hard to
make. Today the passionate and self-motivated labor of the artisan
increasingly becomes the model for a self-disciplining, self-managed
labor force that works harder, longer, and often for less pay precisely
because of its attachment to some degree of personal fulfillment in
forms of engaging work. And that ain’t no way to make a living, having
to struggle three times as hard for just to have a sense of engagement
in meaningful work.
This project sets out to investigate how cultural workers in the
metropolis manage these competing tensions and demands. The goal is to
bring together the dispersed knowledges and experiences of creative
workers finding ways to make a living in the modern metropolis. And by
doing that to create a space to learn from this common experiences that
often are not experienced as such while we work away in different parts
of the city.
:: Minor Compositions ::
http://www.minorcompositions.info
Autonomous politics & aesthetics in the revolutions of everyday life
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