1 ShAre FeStiVAL 2009 - mArKet ForCeS

MARKET FORCES
“No theory escapes the market anymore.” theodor Adorno

Andy CAmeron with LuCA BArBeni

the marketplace is the privileged battleground for ideas or products when their problematics,
concerning chaos and value, meaning and randomness, politics and economics, come to a
head. these unstable and complex abstractions have concrete outcomes on our everyday life.
we have chosen this issue for the points of encounter and contrast that emerge when market
forces meet culture.

Looking at reality from the point of view of the transmission of information and the propagation
of organisation, robert K. Logan identifies four spheres that interact to create reality: “the
biosphere, the symbolosphere, the technosphere and the econosphere.”1
on the common ground created by digital convergence, culture and economics are redefining
the concepts that underpin their organisation through mutual exchange, with the result that “the
distinction between cultural industries and manufacturing industries of consumption goods has
become progressively less clear,” while at the same time “the production of an ethical dimension
in everyday life increasingly tends to occur through consumption practices.”2

Art, just like the market, is increasingly concerned with relational processes instead of
representational procedures. these relationships are created by external forces which act on
culture, and in doing so influence its material, symbolic and strategic levels. each force constitutes
a relationship. each force constitutes a potential to influence, shape and create.

the conference Art vs. the MArket looks at how the globalisation of art and the constant
broadening of the definition of art have combined, on the international art scene, with the need
to reflect upon the socio-cultural impact of software. Franziscka nori places the emphasis on
how the “power that the economy wields over all sectors of political, social and cultural reality
has invested the world of art production, driving the very structure of the art system towards
transformation into the totalizing and increasingly global logic of the market.” Contemporary art
though is also a source of knowledge about the economy, shining a light on hidden and opaque
processes that are often concealed by the media.
the information paradigm promoted by techno-liberals and neo-liberals assumes that the world
is ‘flat’, that money, energy, and culture can flow and circulate freely throughout the planet
without hindrance. But this is not the case. Structural, economic and cultural friction and forces
exist, interacting and interfering with each other everywhere. this vision of a frictionless world
conflicts with reality, which is made up of “patterns of distribution, discussion spaces, complex encounters
and local tensions.”3

the world is not flat, it is complex. it is complexity, rather than the paradigm of information
fluidity, that characterises our reality. different elements, connected through a myriad of dynamics,
self-organised, emergent, open, and adaptive, arise from the local but have effects on the global,
living within a regimen that is far from equilibrium, which is why they evolve. they are the limits
of understanding in complex transition. what does it mean to build systems whose behaviour
we cannot predict or understand? the conference market Forces will be presenting the points
of view of writers, researchers, and economists, while ‘ordinary folk’ explore the problematics of
control and the possibility of building alternative, free and open economies based on giving.
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Anarconomy / september 2009 / www.iff.dk

when specifically analysing the symbolosphere, robert K. Logan identifies fourteen characteristics
of new media: two-way communication, ease of access to and dissemination of information,
continuous learning, the need for alignment and integration, the creation of a community, portability
and the flexibility of time, convergence, interoperability, the aggregation of content, variety and
choice beyond that offered by mass media before the long tail phenomenon, the reintegration
of the consumer and the producer, co-operation, the remix culture and the transition from products
to services.
now, thanks to the integrating and additive force of the internet, all these dynamics are the
directional vectors for innovation in any market or economy.

within this context, Share Festival 2009 will be placing special focus on the relationships that
have emerged between artistic innovation and corporate communications, which, faced with
the need to stand out in an increasingly thick soup of communications, needs artistic
invention/fascination in order to convince/seduce the customer/viewer.

Joel Baumann, renzo di renzo and Alex Giordano each describe, according to their respective
experiences, how art and advertising cross paths in marketing, where they respond to the
challenges of new technologies, cultures and emerging social forms, encourage the progressive
disappearance of the distinction between audience and producer, and explore new forms of
interactions. to quote Alex Giordano, “brands are forms of collective and identity-based
aggregation which take on a political role in the contemporary world, creating imagery to direct
action. they constitute possible worlds that change the world.”

At the same time, market forces help us identify new critical approaches for new media art. in
recent years, media research has been focusing on a new approach that is “more systemic than
symbolic,”4 which considers technology and culture as part of the broader context of production,
and which focuses more on the forces driving a particular cultural form rather than its meanings.
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this new approach is instantiated in two books, ANiMAl spirits by matteo Pasquinelli, presented
by Share at the Quazza Laboratory in April 2009, and Jonathon Beller’s the CiNeMAtiC Mode of
produCtioN: AtteNtioN eCoNoMy ANd the soCiety of the speCtACle, which, with reference to
digital culture and cinema respectively, contextualize these fields within the flow of forces that
bind culture, economics and desire.
in this regard, richard Barbrook has identified the growing socialisation/aestheticization of the
production process,5 a phenomenon gaining speed thanks to the explosion of new media. new
media has led to the aestheticization of consumption goods and the incessant demand for
sociality from a society that is losing its usual social structures, and from the expansion of higher
and tertiary education, which has led to an abundance of motivated people wishing to express
themselves. the so-called creative industry comes from this.

For many years now, artists having been using the insider languages and dynamics of economics
to propose their outsider critiques. today, digital technologies have mediatized the stage, throwing
open as a consequence a multitude of backdoors into, among other things, the economic
world.

As communication technologies have progressively invaded reality, markets have sought new
production opportunities in a field of long-standing experience for artists – the production of
symbols.
“The economy runs on the tracks of cultural values: attention and inspiration, image and identity,”6 however
these values cannot be managed on the old rules of efficiency and parsimony. in order to fully
express these new possibilities, markets need to change and adopt some of the dynamics put
into gear by the internet.

Products have been aestheticized, marketing has become conversational, and in reply artists
have invaded the economic sphere, in a sort of swapping of roles in which artists have trimmed
away pretty frills in their search for active criticism, while markets use fascination strategies to
create emotional attachment. this exchange of roles has never been as effective as today.
Symptomatic of the investment that markets are making in emotions is the rise of popular social
networks, free products that promise satisfaction of personal image and the sensation of building
emotional relationships. “these networks and platforms are not immaterial, but to the contrary,
a sort of embodiment of social relations in code.”7

Anarconomy / september 2009 / www.iff.dk

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the distribution of peer-to-peer content and services has taken the internet by storm. recently,
the Ceo of disney took everyone by surprise by stating that “piracy is a business model.”8

Peer-to-peer production is led by users that join together in independent networks based on
self-determining principles. the traditional commercial market is challenged, and in the end
completed by the supply of non-commercial solutions. All this ferment in the production and
distribution sectors has been called anarconomy. “in the future, anarconomy will move from the
internet and radically change economy in the physical world.”9

in his project squAttiNg superMArket Salvatore iaconesi presents a frontier marketplace that
lives by squatting in existing physical and immaterial infrastructures, in “a technologically
augmented reality which overlaps our ordinary, everyday world.”
the market is already adapting to these new forms of exchange, and it is doing so, according
to michael Bauwens,10 in three modes of adaptation to peer-to-peer dynamics. Production is
being directed towards producing common-pool resources, such as the Linux operating system,
where benefits are shared in the place of profits. the rise of an information barter economy,
such as the internet, where proprietary platforms push towards participation and business models
are based on capturing the attention of users. And finally, there is crowdsourcing, where
corporative structures integrate certain peer-to-peer dynamics in the value chain, for example
the Lego Factory, where users can generate designs that other users can then purchase.

Bearing witness to this is the recent awarding of the nobel Prize for economics elinor ostrom,
for her work on the governance of the commons which dismantles the belief that public goods
should be managed by a centralised government entity or privatised by demonstrating that
public property can be managed successfully by associations of users. hence crowdsourcing
is a successful system for managing collective assets.
the nobel was jointly assigned to oliver williamson, for his work on the theory that companies
can play a structural role in the resolution of conflict. Both of these studies highlight how economic
transactions do not only occur in markets, but also between companies, associations, households
and agencies.

the process integrating the immaterial world into the material world cannot be stopped.
“information wants to be free,” said Stuart Brand; now it is up to markets and culture to adapt.
in these early years of technological development, market forces and forces for change have
come to blows consistently. the solution will lie in their meeting halfway and in learning new
approaches and behaviours.
Adapting may be difficult under the drive of technological innovation, but if “reality has the power
to surprise thought, thought has the power to create reality.”11

noteS

1. understanding New Media: extending Marshall Mcluhan, robert K. Logan Cresskill nJ:
hampton Press. to be released 2009
2. il Consumo come lavoro immateriale, Adam Arvidsson, 2009
http://sites.google.com/site/adamarvidssonsite/home/ilConSumoComeLAVoroimmAteriALe
.doc?attredirects=0
3. Animal spirits, matteo Pasquinelli, nai Publishers, 2008
4. Abstract hacktivism: the making of a hacker culture, otto von Busch e Karl Palmas, 2006
5. imaginary futures, richard Barbrook, Pluto Press, 2007
6. imaginary economics, olav Velthius, Johan&Levi editore, 2009
7. 45 rpM (media history on heavy rotation), Armin medosh, 2009
https://lists.thing.net/pipermail/idc/2009-August/003846.html
8. the pirate’s dilemma: how youth Culture is reinventing Capitalism, matt mason, Free
Press,2009
9. Anarconomy, report#3/2009 http://www.cifs.dk/en/anarconomy.asp
10. Class and Capital in peer production, michael Bauwens, 2009
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Parallel+visions+of+peer+production.-a0194549140
11. la società aperta, George Soros, Ponte alle Grazie, 2000