Finding Happiness in Happiness
Artist Simon Fujiwara and economist Daniel Fujiwara discuss Happy Economics. What is the value in euros of the happiness gained from dancing, per person, per year? Daniel Fujiwara’s company Simetrica could give you an exact figure, helping you to decide if it is worth it to you. This conversation took place leading up to the exhibition.
Business is Creativity
Oleg Fonaryov, an artist as well as the founder and CEO of the 3D rendering company Program-Ace, based in Kharkiv, Ukraine, discusses nearshore labor, virtual reality systems, simulators, and augmented reality—in a conversation that was included in research for Hito Steyerl’s video work The Tower (2015).
Privilege
In her performative practice Amalia Ulman exposes how a technocratic and histrionic culture industry requires the performance of an equally contradictory and fabricated persona. Privilege is both an installation and a performance that takes place in the studio and across the artist’s social media channels. Having begun in late 2015, it draws on the incongruity of pregnancy with certain labor roles and the art world. Ulman feels conscious of the few roles available to her in the culture industry, becoming a service worker and caricature of herself all while she carries a metaphorical idea-baby of replication, continuity, and the monopoly of stereotypes.
Unveiling the Unseen
BlindWiki (2016) is Antoni Abad’s latest project: a location-based audio network which has been developed for and in collaboration with blind and partially sighted people. Users can share their findings by posting sound recordings with their smartphones. The platform does not just contain information about difficulties and barriers but is also a repository for experiences, opinions, and stories, generating a creative and collaborative cartography of the unseen. This project was previously beta-tested in Rome and Sydney and has now been launched in Berlin.