unproductivesolutions

Imagine that tomorrow you wake up on this planet and all social, organizational and communication technologies have disappeared—i.e., email, mobile phones, apps. Anyone who considered themselves a technologist has vanished as well. And no one has a memory of any of these technologies, except for you. This is a post-pandemic world itching with dissatisfaction about tedious bureaucracy and how much we labor, and determined to build lives of meaning. In this vision, you value connecting with others, patience, empathy, ethics, and the right to be lazy, unproductive, creative, complicated, and contradictory. You loved certain aspects of the digital world. For example, it allowed you to exist somewhere and in other worlds at the same time. You treasure having access to multiple points of view that catapult you out of one-way, teller-receiver narratives and teach you to be more flexible. And so you have been appointed the Director of Social Technology with the power to commission and design new technologies facilitating social and workplace interactions. No one has any expectations for what you will create because no one remembers the past.

UnProductiveSolutions (UnPro) is an artwork/curatorial project presenting as an online “company” invested in revolutionary, values-based, ethical technologies. Italy-based curator Marialaura Ghidini and U.S.-based artist Rebekah Modrak invite artists to submit imaginative and conceptually rigorous proposals imagining technologies.

Imagined technologies may be digital, a combination of digital and analog, or post-digital (meaning, an imagined mode of transmission). Proposed technologies do not need to be plausible, may be fantastic, and should be sincere. Proposed technologies should be critical of existing ones in their attempt to generate alternative models, but UnProductiveSolutions is not skeptical or meant to be read as parody.

WHAT THE OPPORTUNITY INCLUDES, IF ACCEPTED — Five proposals will be accepted for artists to develop and complete the work. Artists will receive a $2,000 honorarium / budget upon submission of the final work. As part of the program, we will arrange a studio visit with a specialist, such as a philosopher or astronomer, to further the development of the work. Artists will receive the services of a videographer to create a marketing promotion for your technology. Artworks / technologies will be displayed as a succession of “featured” subsidiary companies on the UnProductiveSolutions exhibition/website.

— Five proposals will be accepted in their current state as proposals. These will receive a $100 honorarium and will be presented in their proposal form as “future projects” on the UnProductiveSolutions exhibition/website.

THE SELECTION PROCESS The Open Call will be reviewed by curator Marialaura Ghidini and artist/writer Rebekah Modrak. We have worked together as Modrak&Ghidini since 2015, starting with the project #exstrange (2017), an intervention into the online marketplace that we enacted between January 15 and April 15, 2017. http://exstrange.com/ This curatorial project developed our collaborative interest in disrupting the rhetor http://exstrange.com/ogies, e-commerce, and the workings of online platforms.

Ghidini is a contemporary art curator and founder/director of the web-based curatorial platform or-bits.com. Her expertise lies in web-based curatorial practices and intersections between art, technology, and society in relation to ideas of “progress” and “betterment.”

Modrak’s practice is at the intersections of art, activism, critical design, and creative resistance to consumer culture. Her Internet-based artworks critique brand messaging. She is a professor at the Stamps School of Art & Design at the University of Michigan.