Arcadia Missa Open Office Anthology

232pp. Includes work from Paul Kneale, Cadence Kinsey, Josephine Berry Slater, Karen Archey, Clunie Reid, Harry Burke, Federico Campagna and LOTS more:

More info documentation of the programme, contributions and work by:

Iain Ball, Matt Drage, Riyo Nemeth, Harry Burke, Yuri Pattison , Michael O’Mahony, Aislin Dowling, Christopher Page, Helga Wretman, Oliver Jennings, Harry Sanderson , Tight Artists Net Gang, Hannah Black, William Kherbek, Marlie Mul, Ann Hirsch, Jennifer Chan, Karen Archey, Clunie Reid , Hannah Perry, Kari Rittenbach, Federico Campagna, Paul Kneale, Faith Holland, Cadence Kinsey, Josephine Berry Slater and Arcadia Missa

The Arcadia Missa Open-Office Programme was an attempt, through its research and curatorial programme, to address precarity as experienced by immaterial labourers working today. AM-OO made explicit ways in which post-Fordist ideological formations such as neoliberalism, democracy as consumer choice, and ‘instant’ communication have come to define the ways in which we work and create (or ‘playbour’), under the rubric of globalized capitalism. This Anthology offers a record of AM-OO and an attempt to propose new conditions for cultural production, specifically those avoiding the fetishization of the objects and social relations of precarity itself. It hopes for a reclamation of representation from the cynical and recursive circulation of images within capitalist realism, and its conceptions of the body in vectored space.

The programme taught us that this examination offers both a site for critique (albeit one always however in tension with the safe, institutional discourse on precarity), but also a collective desire for something different. Where precarity, work, and the ideology of prosumption stop being the total system we have, as yet, only been able to embed ourselves and our social bodies in. Understanding our performance in immaterial and cognitive realms has emerged as one such site. Much of the work within this anthology reflects an attempt to understand and deviate from this.