This workshop takes place in the devastated landscape of the Creative Economy. Dipping cautiously into realms of business and economics (in which artists are generally and probably wilfully unschooled), we will take a pigeon’s-eye view (scrappy, opportunistic, only occasionally vicious) of worn-out tropes such as entrepreneurialism, human capital and cultural enterprise.
Weaving through dense territory from queer theory to open source organisation, radical shopkeeping and the role of economics in performing the economy, we will transit between theory and application to experiment on ourselves with new and wild shapes for enterprise and organisation, both at the level of the individual and at that of the collective. In the process we will also assess the case for administration as an art form; and business as a medium for artistic enquiry and meaning-making.
Biography
Kate Rich is a trade artist and feral economist, born in Australia and living in Bristol UK. She is co-founder of the Bureau of Inverse Technology (BIT), an international agency producing an array of critical information products including economic and ecologic indices, event-triggered webcam networks and animal operated emergency broadcast devices. The Bureau's work has been exhibited in academic, scientific and museum contexts. Since 2003 she has run Feral Trade, a long-range economic experiment and underground freight network, utilising the spare carrying capacity of the art world for the transportation of other goods, specifically groceries. Kate is senior lecturer in DIY and activist media at the University of the West of England; volunteer finance manager at Bristol's artist-run Cube Microplex; system administrator for the Irational.org art-server collective; and a founding member of the European Sail Cargo Alliance. Her ongoing preoccupation is to move deeper into the infrastructure of trade, administration, organisation and economy in the cultural realm. To this end she is currently establishing a Feral MBA for artists, positioned somewhere between the academy and the wild.