Newsgroups: workspace.g-recycling_the_future,
workspace.recycling_the_future


previous    top    workgroup    thread    next


Subject: As the Recycling the Future team descends on the Hybrid WorkSpace...
From: rax <rax@thing.at>
Date: Fri, 18 Jul 1997 12:49:24 METDST

* * * * *


Subject: As the Recycling the Future team descends ....
From: Tom Sherman twsherma@mailbox.syr.edu


----------------------------------------------------------------------
RECYCLING THE FUTURE / A PROJECT IN 4 EPISODES
http://thing.at/orfkunstradio/FUTURE/DX/
----------------------------------------------------------------------

As the Recycling the Future team descends on the Hybrid WorkSpace...

Tom Sherman, remote volunteer,
Port Mouton, Nova Scotia, July 16, 1997.

As the Recycling the Future team descends on the Hybrid WorkSpace, I
can't help but remember the future, as I once knew it years ago. You
know we were always taught that the future would bring us the leisure
society, a societal condition where we would be working hard everyday
to amuse ourselves, not to create material goods. Now I don't want to
imply that the media artists and information producers setting up camp
at the Hybrid WorkSpace are just working for themselves, to keep
themselves busy, because of course they are going to have an audience
besides themselves and each other. I shouldn't say they, but rather
we, as I'm also revisiting a future where it will be possible to work
in Kassel from my home in rural Nova Scotia, where I'm writing this
this morning. We will have the art audience and we'll have the broader
potential audience. The art audience, they are certainly part of the
leisure society we heard would develop by the end of this century.

To double back for just a moment, everyone, even artists and
information producers of every stripe, know that the global economy
(the ecology of exchanges measured by symbolic currencies) is now
driven by information and knowledge. We still have the resource
economy (fish and chicken and gold and silica...) and manufacturing
(computers and office furniture and paintings) and the service sector
(hair styling, fish and chicken cooked with different sauces, banks),
but the economic sector that is really kicking ass is the information
and knowledge sector. I&K. The I&K phenomena is basically an endless
description of how we can better manage the resource, manufacturing
and service industries. And looking ahead, how we can manage the
leisure and tourism and finally outer space industries. We now
generate texts on how to manage our resources (how to raise fatter
chickens on less feed); how to be more efficient in manufacturing
products (how to raise fatter chickens on less feed); and how to
provide services that people want and need (how to serve tastier
chickens at lower costs). The I&K sector is the 'how to' sector of the
economy. The I&K (information-knowledge) explosion is a great time to
be an artist, or a consultant or any other form of scribe
(decipherer, describer, ..cyber describer) because I&K workers make a
living deciphering and describing things...they make texts, not tables
and chairs or sculpture or paintings. Images, sounds, ideas,
concepts--and strings of same.

So the Recycling the Future team and every other team setting up their
data processing or information production facilities there (here) in
the Hybrid WorkSpace are getting ready to describe something. We're
getting ready to describe the resource, manufacturing and service
sectors and of course there's the leisure and tourism sector. But
before we get back to killing time and amusing ourselves, let's
examine the changing nature of work itself and how it provides us with
the raw material of our identities, our psychological anchors or
security blankets. The Hybrid WorkSpace is a virtual employment zone.
VEZ. A VEZ, it's an 'office' or an information 'market-place', or a
simply wonderful place where unemployed or underemployed people find
the work they really want to do. It's a work-zone where pure work,
relatively uncompromised work can be found or invented or taken up or
on. It's not like a school, where societal roles are worn like
business suits until they fit more or less and are modelled down a
fashion ramp right into the world. No, the Hybrid WorkSpace is a more
difficult, mysterious, ill-defined zone. The time-line for success is
compressed (careers are not launched in a VEZ) and there's simply more
media than there is action. In fact, there's no action there to start
with--it all has to be created. So the Recycling the Future team and
every other team has brought the tools for taking and making action
and generating images and voices and generating a local, virtual
explosion of description, a kit for making a text-bomb. And by text I
mean virtual chickens and cows and hairstyles and closeups of the
horrors of the unemployed, homeless and murdered, not sculpture and
paintings or office furniture.

Now I'm imagining this Hybrid WorkSpace as being something between an
office, a cafe and the home. You know, the places where work occurs
today, in the future (July, 1997). Of course today work also takes
place in cars and on bicycles and on skateboards (and on planes and
trains) and while people are walking and talking. Talking is
important, except when you're stalking. Information is often a
solitary, foraging activity. Back to motion, work today is often
mobile and frequently taking place while one is in transition.
Portable. If work can be anything that people want or have to do--and
description is hard work and must be motivated by desire--then it can
take place anywhere. Before I go any further with this somewhat
staggering overview (please don't make me walk a straight line), it
strikes me that this is a 'make work' project. You know, the
government pays people to apply themselves in socially constructive
ways to solve the problem of social volatility and instability. You
know it used to be just youth rolling around, drinking and drugging
and fucking and 'wasting their lives'. Shit, they aren't describing
anything, accept how to party. Hell, there's still too much human
waste in the youth sector--but even more distressing is the empty
thrashing around of the middle-aged. We have all these life-skills and
still we're bored and disenchanted and so critical and destructive.
We need hard problems to solve, difficult employment, virtual
employment zones (VEZ's) where resources are provided, some travel
permitted, networking tools at our fingertips...but there's nothing
else, except an inappropriate setting, a big art fair (Documenta) and
a stream of leisure-class tourists, perhaps impervious to 'real work'.
The Hybrid WorkSpace is such an extremely difficult, virtual
employment zone. It's a junction where intriguing connections will
have to be made, or the leisure class and their propensity for boredom
will prevail.

You know it isn't just the youth and the middle-aged that are wasting
their lives, not describing anything productive, it's the elderly that
we've really got to worry about. The governments will have to set up
'make work' projects like the Hybrid WorkSpace for the elderly as
well. Shit, if I was 77 years old, I'd probably have to lie about my
age to get you to post my messages as part of your Recycling fiasco.
Fuck, it's not just 'make work' problem, having to be socially
productive or constructive is like a prison for the elderly, who quite
frankly just want to cut loose after leading practically endless
productive lives and then being rejected by the assholes now running
the economy. If I were 77 and I was generating internet traffic and
setting up so many web-sites I couldn't remember where the servers
were, let alone the point of my abandoned pages. Hell, I get e-mail
from people I don't remember writing to now. The future is memory
disorders. I just turn on my e-mail in the morning and weed through
the in-basket. Who the hell are these people anyway! I comb through
the messages, trying to remember anything about any of them and then I
make some mental notes on the work I'd like to do today, but then I
just forget to move on these matters...so I make long lists and they
just keep getting longer and longer, on little stacks of paper and
index cards. And then finally I send off four or five messages like
messages in a bottle and three or four of them never seem to have any
effect, because I'm 77 and no one gives a shit about my descriptions.
I'm hoping they, the government, will set up a virtual employment zone
for people like me. You know, a real, physical place where I can meet
people and trade things that I get off on and find my voice again. I
know ways to party too. I'm knee-deep in my own kind of human waste.
Give me a chance and I'll throw some shit at the tourists. Hybrid
WorkSpace my ass!


------------