IO_lavoro immateriale [http://io.khm.de/lavoro/]
Project description
IO_lavoro immateriale is a collaborative database on the Internet, generated during the time of the Venice Biennale '99 by Maurizio Lazzarato (political theorist), Luther Blisset (collective of media activists), Michael Hardt (philosopher), Hans Ulrich Reck (media theorist), Enzo Rullani (economist) and Iaia Vantaggiato (journalist). The database serves as an open discursive machine to question the current conditions of creative action and production in society. Starting from the analysis of 'immaterial labour' (all forms of creative, intellectual and affective labour are fully integrated and essential factors in the dominant economical production), the group collaboratively searches for contemporary political forms and concepts of creative actions in the public sphere of Italy today. Each of the participants develops an individual map with textual information (Italian, English), evolving it into a continuously transforming discursive topology. The information of all maps of the different participants self-organises on an extra map. Here the relations between the information included and arranged by the different participants will be visualized as movements and force fields. Visitors in the exhibition (Austrian Pavillion) could physically experience this collaborative database via magnetic
Credits:
Knowbotic Research in collaboration with Maurizio Lazzarato, Luther Blisset, Michael Hardt, Hans Ulrich Reck, Enzo Rullani, Iaia Vantaggiato.
Produced with ZKM Karlsruhe (eSCAPE), supported by Academy for Media Arts Cologne.
Software: Detlev Schwabe, Andreas Schiffler, KR+cF.
Hardware: Large Surface Magnetic Force Feedback Technology by ZKM.
Translations database: Luther Blisset, Angela Melitopoulos, Paolo Atzori
Special thanks to Siegfried Zielinski
Annotation Knowbotic Research
IO_lavoro immateriale (Venice Biennale 1999) forms part of an aggregate of network projects called IO_dencies (spoken as 'tendencies') which deal with the problem of agency, the construction of interdiscursive collaborative fields, open dynamic databases and computer-based interfaces. These aggregates are presented as urban spaces of action and reflexion which are publically accessible and modifiable.
Interfaces as constructions of a public sphere
The technologically based artistic practices and developments of Knowbotic Research were taken as a starting point for co-operations with local participants in Tokyo, Sao Paulo and the Ruhr Area. Urban processes were read collaboratively and made available in a database. In continuous mutual transformations and re-articulations of the local participants during several months, the recorded processes achieved an electronic urban presence. Through these collaborative constructions and experiences, the participants could address potential fields of intervention in their social living environments.
The project, IO_lavoro immateriale, moves away from the concrete, urban context and targets some of the central discussion topics of the public sphere: work, subjectivity and social production. In contrast to the earlier project phases, it builds on an already existing local discussion about Immaterial Labour*. This debate has been conducted in Italy since the 1970s and later during the Paris exile by circles around Toni Negri, Maurizio Lazzarato and others. These theorists currently try to develop possibilities of public agency in the Italian political sphere. In the context of the Biennaleproject, Maurizio Lazzarato has been invited by Knowbotic Research to develop a publically available on-line IO_Dencies platform around the theme of 'Creative Public Action' with a group of selected people.
The project IO_lavoro immateriale offered the participants a technologically supported organisational and operational platform for their interdiscursive processes. Supported by machinic self-organisation processes, the developments and investigations of the participants became visible in time and space.
IO_lavoro immateriale articulates a connective interface which incorporates the potentials of agency in the multiple movements of the information. The interface itself becomes the open result of immaterial labour.
* 'Immaterial labour' refers to actions which preceed the production of goods and which allow for the evolvement of social relations, forms of life and modes of subjectivation. It is not a category determined by 'work', but an autonomous and independent field of agency which anticipates contractual and paid labour and which overrules their conception. (Maurizio Lazzarato)
