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forword.grants /
marketing.colony /
equiptment acquisition /
symptom hall.space /
phoenix.cinecycle /
ancient futures.the net /
performance.women's work /
gender.performance /
do it yourself ethos-zines /
robot writing /
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oca.zines /
retail.books /
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equiptment acquisition
Artist-run centres have also internalized market-driven metaphors to somehow rationalize our continuing existence.
"The money comes and the material purchased becomes obsolete (through use) in several years. The programme established or furthered by the equipment previously purchased is now a form of symbolic capital invested by the (centre) and the funding agencies. Requests for upgrading go out, emphasizing the invested aspect, pointing out changes in technology and outlining how technological improvement will enhance the equity resident in the documentation and artifacts produced by the previous and continuing programme. The cycle starts again...requests, funds, obsolescences."
- William Wood, "This is Free Money?",
Whispered Art History : Twenty Years At the Western Front, ed. Keith Wallace, Arsenal Pulp Press,
Vancouver 1993. p. 182.
The reciprocity between cultural funding and the accumulation of collateral assets unfolds in the activities and maintenance of the artist-run equipment access centres, and in those of the cultural agencies. Hardware is the pretext to rationalize the continuation of both. The contestable assumption here is that it is costly but essential for artists to have access to the newest technology, whether it is to achieve "industry standard" quality, to provide low-cost "R & D" services, or to critically inhabit it before its commercial purposing is completely locked. If in fact this 'critical inhabitation' of technology has lead to social change, the effects have been thinly documented. Contrast this spiral of upgrades with the dumpster-diving, cast-off collecting, borrowing and bricolage that sustains marginal self-funded publication and exhibition. Almost all "marginal" producers engage in recycling and repurposing obsolete imagery and technology. The bad xerox collage is emblematic of this cycle of garbage-scoring, tinkering, breakdown, cannibalizing and reconfiguring.
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