Knows no weekend: the psychological contract of cultural work in precarious times

This article explores the expanded and transformed nature of the psychological work contract for forms of cultural and artistic labour in precarious conditions. The forms of passionate work found within cultural production are argued to form a new model for governing our subjective involvement in and attachment to work. This more expansive and demanding relationship with work has become generalized beyond the specific area of cultural production into employment relationships more generally. In doing so the expanded psychological contract of work comes to operate as a form of logistical media and infrastructural governance, connecting the micropolitics of governing labour with larger structural conditions of precarity and instability. Thus, while work today is less stable in what it offers, it demands even greater psychological investment despite increased uncertainty

Spectral Compositions in a Time of Revolt

In March 2017, Firstsite, a contemporary art gallery in Colchester, UK, hosted #WorldsUpsideDown, an exhibition curated by Stevphen Shukaitis that explored art’s treatment of moments of destabilization, crisis, and renewal. Included were photographs by Cairo-based artist Mosa’ab Elshamy of the 2011-2013 revolt in Egypt; Justseeds’s Celebrate People’s History poster series; and David Mabb’s Long Live the New! Morris & Co, Hand Printed Wallpapers and K. Malevich’s, Suprematism. These works were chosen because each communicates or represents moments of upheaval and provokes questions for audiences about how such moments resonate with each other and about what we can learn from aesthetic representation of such moments. Connecting with the themes of this issue, the exhibit explored how cycles of struggle expand aesthetic possibilities and media communications, from the Russian revolution’s embrace of the avant-garde to more recent utilization of social media. A public seminar with Richard Gilman-Opalsky and Stevphen Shukaitis was organized to explore themes in the exhibition and in their respective writings. What follows is an excerpt from that seminar

Publishing to Find Comrades

Open source publishing, in all its versions and mutations, is an area of research and media practice that has become much more popular recently. It is precisely because of this the questions it raises for cultural production are today all the more pressing. How does a form of media production where the good produced is given away to people sustain itself? How can it produce livelihoods for its associated "below the line" editorial workers, as well all the other associated forms of cultural labor undertaken in the production chain, from distribution to retail? This essay considers some of these questions, not from a general perspective, but rather from how they filter through and affect the nature of autonomous print cultures. For these print projects questions about labor, conditions and the sustainability of the project are all the more pressing because of how they relate to and are embedded within the goal of the social movement organizing that they emerge from

Reimagining the Comic Form: History, Narrative, and the Work of Sonny Liew

This interview with comic and graphic artist Sonny Liew surveys his work over the past 15 years, which has brought more attention to comics from Southeast Asia and expanded the possibilities of the medium. Liew discusses his influences and approach to storytelling, and engaging with the histories and political milieus that often form the backdrop to and inform the stories being told