"MSDM (Mobile Strategies of Display and Mediation): Outsourcing"
2002-11-13 until 2002-12-06
Institute of International Visual Arts
London, , UK

Initiated in 1998 by artist Paula Roush, msdm attempts to negotiate the socio-political structures that intersect with the creative industries. msdm operates across many different platforms, engaging elements of contemporary culture including web streaming, brand identity, computer gaming, activism, statistics and software design.

Outsourcing - when a corporation subcontracts labour that is often cheap and located in low-cost (i.e. non-western) economic zones - has been a central objection of the anti-globalisation movement for some time. msdm's new work Outsourcing interrogates the relationships between art, labour and productive systems by exploring the different facets of branding, commercial arts funding and anti-corporate activism. Outsourcing questions the outmoded categories of the artist, curator, critic and funder and proposes that the entire chain of cultural production is an interlocking network. Additionally, the title Outsourcing makes reference to the way in which the exhibition's contents are outsourced from the geographical and socio-political context of inIVA.

Outsourcing features different components that have been outsourced to other artists, among them a 'bot' software device, Coybott, that robotically searches the internet for information and a publication about labour, social thought and aesthetic production. The core of the exhibition will contain elements relating to rooms from different periods in the Geffrye Museum in Shoreditch. The project will also include parallel activities, such as a film programme curated by Anthony Iles and a collection of audio-visual narratives on work and labour presented by El Sueno Colectivo. On Friday 22 November 2002, 2pm at TheSpace@inIVA, Zeigam Azizov (artist/critic) will be in conversation with Paula Roush on the 'Domestication of Visual Pleasure'. This will be followed by a guided walk to the Geffrye Museum. (Refreshments will be provided.)

Outsourcing is produced in collaboration with sound artist and media activist Sasha Costanza-Chock and Octavi Comeron, an artist and publisher. Outsourcing addresses the relationship between 'hardware' (as the physical production of goods displayed in the exhibition space) and 'software' (as the production of meaning and codes via both the 'producer' and the audience).

Outsourcing is the final project for inIVA's Soft Season, a series of events, collaborations and interventions that explores the creative collision between artist and curator.

IMAGE:
msdm,
Living U.S. Patent No.5,156,811 Museum,
wireless stream van,
Living Art Museum, Reykjavik, 2001

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