<nettime> The Metropolitan Factory: Worker’s Inquiry & Creative Labor Today

[Stevphen Shukaitis <stevphen@autonomedia.org>]

Minor Compositions is launching a workers’ inquiry into the shaping of 
creative, cultural, and artistic labor in the metropolis.

We are currently searching for accomplices and comrades to take part and 
further develop this investigation. Description and more information below.

Cheers,
Stevphen


The Metropolitan Factory
making a living as a creative worker

Website: http://metropolitanfactory.wordpress.com
Short survey on creative labor here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/97K8BNK

Surviving as a cultural or artistic worker in the city has never been 
easy. Creative workers find themselves celebrated as engines of economic 
growth, economic recovery and urban revitalization even as the 
conditions for our continued survival becomes more precarious. How can 
you make a living today in such a situation? That is, how to hold 
together the demands of paying the rent and bills while managing all the 
tasks necessary to support one’s practice? How to manage the tensions 
between creating spaces for creativity and imagination while working 
through the constraints posed by economic conditions?

In a more traditional workplace it is generally easy to distinguish 
between those who planned and managed the labor process and those who 
were involved in its executions: between the managers and the managed. 
For creative workers these distinctions become increasingly hard to 
make. Today the passionate and self-motivated labor of the artisan 
increasingly becomes the model for a self-disciplining, self-managed 
labor force that works harder, longer, and often for less pay precisely 
because of its attachment to some degree of personal fulfillment in 
forms of engaging work. And that ain’t no way to make a living, having 
to struggle three times as hard for just to have a sense of engagement 
in meaningful work.

This project sets out to investigate how cultural workers in the 
metropolis manage these competing tensions and demands. The goal is to 
bring together the dispersed knowledges and experiences of creative 
workers finding ways to make a living in the modern metropolis. And by 
doing that to create a space to learn from this common experiences that 
often are not experienced as such while we work away in different parts 
of the city.

:: Minor Compositions ::
http://www.minorcompositions.info
Autonomous politics & aesthetics in the revolutions of everyday life


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