Tonica Hunter in a conversation
with wuwu Collective

August 2024

TH: Hello fellow artists, first of all your work is so important and powerful - thank you. As a curator who works between art and activism, I was so excited to see your body of work within this residency. Thank you for being here. Especially in the context of Austria, your work is as pressing and relevant as ever.
Something we have spoken about during the time of your residency is position or perspective: you once told me you have to justify to others you're encountering that you are not the oppressor, although to some, you might well look like one. But the position has come up several times. We know historically the loadedness of the colonial, anthropological gazes and orientalist views which have very material consequences beyond solely a view or look. How have you found navigating your own position amidst these historically very problematic viewpoints which have been allowed to dominate documentary style? How are you finding your way?

Wuwu: The root of documentary film was ethnographic documentation, serving as a tool of the empire for colonization based on the falsehood of the "objective" lens of the camera & white gaze. Exoticizing, objectifying, patronizing. There's always a degree of romanticizing that is also found in a lot of tourism advertisements - an escape from the modern toil of 9-5 in the backdrop of [insert tropical paradise, desert oasis, pina colada on the beach, African safari…] What does it mean to seek an "authentic" experience of the culture you are visiting? Is it an arrested version stuck in a specific stereotype in history? I.e., Geisha in kimono, Native Americans in feathered headdresses on a horse, etc. These images are in itself propaganda in how one is told to consume the "other". Having an honest look at the gap between the lived experiences and stereotypes is something we plan to achieve in this work, that tourism is, in reality, a capitalistic extension of the colonial gaze.
Secondly, in terms of documentaries - If images of atrocities and evidence can convince people, all the ongoing genocides and violence against oppressed people would stop, but "never again" keeps repeating. We are consciously rejecting trauma porn, so playing with fiction and sci-fi is a way to challenge our perception and, hopefully, get people curious about how visually literate we actually are. Besides, good storytelling is what moves the heart; storytelling, in essence, is fiction since it relies on a narrative structure for that emotional arc and reveals, a construct that is revised and edited for the intended impact. There are enough studies that show that we remember the same event differently. Our memories are more or less stories we tell ourselves… so in that sense - memory, fiction, and nonfiction start to blur - that is the ambiguous space I'm interested in working in. Truth is slippery; it can be beautiful, messy, and sloppy. What does truth feel like when words fail to communicate the experience? Film can emote that when words aren't enough. For truth to exist, it needs to be witnessed. Inserting our subjective experience is a way of anchoring that truth, to be responsible for my biases and position.

Wuwu: The support for Uyghurs is severely lacking, same for Sudan, Congo, Myanmar... the list goes on. Unfortunately, there's still a lot of disbelief that Uyghurs experience genocide. We remember having to explain who Uyghurs are (most didn't know in 2017), and then having to defend that the genocide is actually happening even to this day is extremely disturbing. CCP runs a tight propaganda machine, and most countries are too reliant on economic relationships with China to speak out. The frustration from the impossibility of finding practical support & funding without creepy strings attached made this work incredibly difficult to finish.
We can't help but admit how bizarre it is to work on this in Austria that the first time we ever received any funding for this work in the past 7 years was from a country that voted no in the UN for a ceasefire in Palestine. A country where Hitler is from, where concentration camps were built and Jews were murdered. The silence persisted, but now, for a different oppressed group, it's interesting which genocide is silenced and which is not. Nobody's free until everyone is free; Fannie Lou Hamer said that; we feel that immensely here, irony and all.

TH: Finally, you choose to remain anonymous in your works due to the dangers of revealing your identity in line with your work. How has that fared in light of the pressure for artists to be more visible both on and offline, and how has that impacted your work and voice?

March 2024

The process of art persecution we are facing and following is far from unique; it has a long history, and the geography of the persecution of art is expanding, even if it does not always concern countries with autocratic regimes. We know of high-profile cases in countries with developed democracies, where instead of state control, the repressive policies can be dictated by corporate interests, Church concerns about values protection, moral panic, institutional self-censorship, or even predatory strategies of the art market. In the research literature, it is more common to characterise the reactionary processes as censorship than persecution or even foreclosure, which Judith Butler understands as the system where the "codes of unspoken rules dictate what is permissible in speech and language" [1]. German sociology and social psychology have coined the term "vorauseilender Gehorsam" ('anticipatory obedience'), which refers to the voluntary anticipation of a presumed desired behaviour. In anticipation of a command, a behaviour is performed independently, even before an explicit request to do so. While persons acting in anticipatory obedience can retain the illusion that they are acting voluntarily, this behaviour is also one of the main ingredients of politically totalitarian systems. In parallel to this, it is also important to remember the notion of the 'spiral of silence' [2], which reveals that the fear of isolation is stronger than an individual's own judgement.
Self-censorship doesn't occur from nothing. To avoid direct expressions, to refuse to touch contradictory topics, or on the contrary, to repeat platitudes, to 'preach to the choir', to 'gelatinise' [3] the aesthetics to the level of indistinction – these all are political gestures, as Ranciere [4] would put it, even if the artist calls themselves apolitical.

These are the symptoms of coexistence with aggressive forces and violent political and corporative interests that are not eager to applaud one's truth-seeking endeavours, which have become the markers of our time. However, already in 1967, in the essay Truth and Politics [5], Hannah Arendt wrote:

While probably no former time tolerated so many diverse opinions on religious or philosophical matters, factual truth, if it happens to oppose a given group's profit or pleasure, is greeted today with greater hostility than ever before. To be sure, state secrets have always existed; every government must classify certain information, withhold it from public notice, and he who reveals authentic secrets has always been treated as a traitor. With this, I am not concerned here. The facts I have in mind are publicly known, and yet the same public that knows them can successfully, and often spontaneously, taboo their public discussion and treat them as though they were what they are not – namely, secrets.

Those artists and creators who decided not to compromise or (to avoid any heroisation) simply were unlucky contribute to statistical records. The Freemuse [6] organisation, an independent international non-governmental entity advocating for freedom of artistic expression and cultural diversity, conducts a State of Artistic Freedom research every year. If we look at the reports throughout the last four years, we will see the following statistics about the acts of violations against art and artists. For instance, 711 cases of attacks on freedom of artistic expression have been registered in 93 countries and online in 2019. In 2020, this number grew to 978 cases in 89 countries and online spaces. In 2021, the scale of oppression is illustrated by the more than 1,251 violations of artistic freedom in 103 countries and in the online space, with 39 recorded murders of artists – the highest reported number in recent years. In 2022 – 2023, with outbreaks of wars between Russia and Ukraine, Israel and Palestine, and a civil war in Sudan, the numbers are yet to come, and they will be horrific.
The statistics thoroughly collected through open sources and direct addresses often give a radically different picture from what one usually receives through mass media. As an example, in 2019, 65% of violation cases against LGBTI artists took place in countries without the law criminalising homosexuality. In 2019, the most significant number of imprisoned artists, namely 14, was in Spain. And in 2022-2023, Germany had the highest number of cancelled events due to censorship [7]. Still, without doubt, throughout recent years, the leading positions in the oppression of art have been shared among Iran, Turkey, Myanmar/ Burma, Russia, Belarus, South Africa, Cuba, Israel/ Palestine, and Afghanistan [8].
The cases that end up on the report pages are resonant but comprise only the top of the iceberg. The majority will remain unseen and unregistered since publicity, in most cases, can play a negative role in an individual's destiny. At the same time, we know little about the conditions under which artists continue to make art, the strategies they employ to

protect themselves and avoid drawing unwanted attention to their work, and the self-censorship that inevitably conflicts with the author's intentions. We observe the process of how artistic expression, suffering from censorship or self-censorship pressures, undergoes many changes: what became dangerous to speak about directly begins to be spoken about indirectly, starts to disguise itself, or indicates its absence. Artists deploy new self-protection strategies, but some, even after changing their address and country, do not dare to express themselves openly or directly. This has given rise to a new and unexplored system of imagery, non-appearance, and non-expressiveness, which will be the object of our interest. The only possible strategy for studying these processes is to work directly with the artists, so we would like to start with our open call.


______________________
[1] Judith Butler, "Ruled Out: Vocabularies of the Censor", in Censorship and Silencing: Practices of Cultural Regulation, Robert C. Post (ed.), Rebecca Frazier (man. ed.), Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities 1998, p. 247–61.

[2] Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, "The spiral of silence: a theory of public opinion", Journal of Communication, #24, 1974, p. 43–51.

[3] Marina Grzinic, Sefic Tatlic, Necropolitics, Racialization, and Global Capitalism: Historicization of biopolitics and Forensics of Politics, Art, and Life, Lanham—Boulder—New-York—London: Lexington Books 2014.
Marina Grzinic uses a term by López Petit – 'gelatinisation' – as a repetitive performative mechanism, equating global capitalism as the only possible social reality.

[4] Jacques Ranciere, Dissensus. On Politics and Aesthetics, London & New York: Continuum International Publishing Group 2010.

[5] Hannah Arendt, "Truth and Politics", The New Yorker, February 25, 1967, p. 49.

[6] Freemuse. Freemuse has United Nations Special Consultative Status to the Economic and Social Council (UN-ECOSOC) and Consultative Status with UNESCO.

[7] OPEN: Archive of Silence 26.02.2024 : Public Cancellations

[8] Freemuse SAF Report 2019-2022

June 2023

KY: This call, (Un)limited Artistic Resource, turns out to be a straight outcome of Austrian post-pandemic cultural policy. In one sentence, the official stance can be formulated as such: acknowledgement of artistic labour, the importance of “fair pay”, and cultural solidarity to those suffering the war in Europe. In reality, it turns out that solidarity is punishable in the long run, and the “fair pay” demanded by the state must be performed at the expense of the infrastructural and material means of cultural institutions. Well, for this round, AIR InSILo got 25 per cent less support from the Austrian Federal Ministry, and this particular event inevitably influenced the new thematic call that we called (Un)limited Artistic Resource. It should raise the question of general artistic precarity, the lesser means with which even the states of economically developed countries want us to produce the works, point at the unequal distribution of support in the art-sphere and analyse the current complex situation. But before coming to the particular points of our discussion, let’s highlight the important theoretical sources and terms we will address during our talk.

MB: The image of the suffering artist is still sexy. In precarious conditions, always on the limit, starving and freezing, s/he forgoes the socially agreed basic requirements of life (minimum salary, pension entitlement, basic social security) in order to devote themselves exclusively and uncompromisingly to their art. This image fits in well with the neoliberal agenda of an art market that breeds a few well-paid superstars on the compost of a massive artist precariat (a successful business model).
The art market is an extreme example of Thomas Piketty's damning finding of a meritocratic society that in the 21st century is increasingly approaching (or will exceed) the historically most extreme inequality of wealth to date, circa 1910, where less than 1% of the richest class of the population owns more than the 50% of the lowest income class combined. With the difference that at the beginning of the 20th century, large fortunes were almost exclusively inherited, whereas extreme wealth today is a mixture of inherited capital and disproportionately high income (‘manager salaries').
Applied to the situation of artists, it also seems to be true that the 1% of the best earners (who can be found at the top of the annual artist rankings) earn more than the 50% of the "losers" together, whose annual income is often far below the poverty line. This market-hyped condition obscures the fact that the "starving artist" is an invention of Romanticism - that is, relatively recent. For many centuries, from Classical Antiquity through the Middle Ages to the early 20th century, artists were valued or at least integrated parts of society. They received commissions, ran workshops, trained apprentices, were invited to design churches, courtyards and townhouses and were paid accordingly. Of course, even then there were stars who enjoyed higher prestige and earned higher fees, and simple, less well-paid craftsmen. Nevertheless, art was basically part of the life of society.
The art market that slowly began with the Renaissance turned artists more and more into entrepreneurs competing for larger, more prestigious and lucrative commissions. The ideologization of the image of the artist in Romanticism, the capitalist principles of the industrial age/modernism, including the instalment of a private gallery sector as we know it now, and finally the current neoliberal agenda dropped artists from the centre of society, drove them into isolation and extreme individualisation and finally into the trap of self-marketing and self-optimisation that we are all currently falling into.

Piketty writes:

Modern meritocratic society [...] is much harder on the losers, because it seeks to justify domination on the grounds of justice, virtue, and merit, [and not of being born into an owning class whose wealth is based on inheritance; something that one cannot influence oneself. Note.] to say nothing of the insufficient productivity of those at the bottom. (Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, p. 416)

Failure (or what is thought to be a failure: lack of success) becomes intrinsic and unsuccessful artists will always look for and find the reasons within themselves - their own inability, lack of talent, assertiveness or self-marketing - instead of questioning a system that, due to its own neoliberal structure, constantly produces losers (or cannot help but constantly produce losers).
One way for artists to escape this pressure is to organise themselves collectively, to create alternative production possibilities, places for discussion and mutual support - "artist-run spaces": studio communities, artist-run galleries, and artist-in-residence programs, among others. On the one hand, this enables permanent feedback on one's own work - which is indispensable for further development (and thus replaces self-promotion and advertising, which cannot achieve this anyway) - on the other hand, it is a model of the alternative acquisition of common means of production (tools, equipment, technology and spaces) in order to circumvent the economic pressure of having to be successful. The saying "sharing is caring" actually has a lot going for it here, because the interaction results in both economic and personal sharing and giving; in this way, life and (artistic) work can no longer be separated from each other.
The public sector, at least in Austria, has recognised this potential (which, by the way, is economically much more favourable than the market-based model) and supports some of these initiatives with tax money. In the meantime, it has also been declared that fair pay guidelines should be applied to artistic and cultural work and the initiatives (including those run by artists themselves) have been made responsible for this.

Ahead of the new AIR InSILo 2023/2024 round, Ksenia Yurkova and Martin Breindl debate the present condition of artists' labour conditions.

But this is where a paradoxical situation sets in: since funding is almost never paid out in the budgeted amount and in many cases is even cut (in the case of AIR InSILo by ¼ of the previous year's budget) - but on the other hand, the payment of fair salaries and fees is demanded, either the programme has to be cut or no more means of production can be purchased. Both of these are at the expense of the artists who run the organisations collectively and share all of this (means of production and program) with other artists. This is the dilemma we face today.

KY: To be honest, every time I have to write a new text for an application, formulate the next open call, etc., I start thinking feverishly: do I have enough proficiency in this question, I want to work with as a curator or artist? Have I spent enough time reading all the expert opinions on the issue? Did I contribute to getting access to the sources from which I can learn? Have the texts been translated into languages I know? Should I have spent more time studying languages and educating myself? Meritocracy has become my superego, I am becoming a loser in my own eyes even before society and the community label me a loser. That is, I internalize these competition rules without even remembering that I had to cut back on books this year because of budget cuts (and I can only read from a screen for 30 minutes), that I live in a foreign country where language and lack of connections are the main gatekeepers to both the job and the art markets. And most importantly, apart from the interesting pastime of reading, I am mainly absorbed in the completely uninteresting pastime of, for example, filling out applications, or reports, which take longer every year. In the end, I need to agree that how I formulate an application will be influenced not only by my own skills but more by the circumstances around me. Based on our current survey (which we will leave open so that as many artists as possible can participate), on average, more than half of the respondents spend more than two days working on one application. More than half of the respondents submit more than 20 applications per year. So we get about 40 unpaid days for submitting applications alone. In 2018, the average artist's earnings in Austria (where culture and the arts are among the most subsidized in Europe) were 5,500 euros a year. While in the pandemic, the state helped artists quite a lot (most of the respondents claimed that they never earned that much in their lives); but, as we all know, these state debts are already distributed for several generations forward; and now the art and culture subsidies are decreasing and will definitely continue in frames of the upcoming right-wing policies of austerity. At the moment, in our survey, the average earnings per year is just over €6,500 per year, but this is the result for Europe as a whole.
That said, on average, based on our survey, artists participate in an average of 4 exhibitions a year. The process of constant debate around artist wages keeps the fee for participation in a group exhibition from 200 to 600 Euros, and from 400 to 1200 Euros (mainly in the countries of Central and Western Europe). A new fetish in the art world, which has actively taken over the media and mind space, is the fully sponsored mobility programs and art residencies, living its renaissance after the pandemics and coinciding with the forced mobility of artists and cultural workers from the war territories or due to political persecutions.
A new turn of fuss indicative of the current state of the arts can be seen for example in this letter (date: June 2023). (I highlighted the most succous parts indicating very particular semantics)

















It is a residency in The Netherlands, The Hague, offering one place for two months. It pays a fee of 1500 Euros; and if we divide the fee by the days of stay, we get 25 Euros per day, which is lower than a per diem rate for this country. The residency has received almost a thousand applications.
Unfortunately, I have no information on how many applications get residences without funding, I'm sure they also do. Two years ago I did a study similar to our survey with participants from Eastern Europe. There, the data clearly suggested that artists were willing to participate in unpaid events and exhibitions, and for the most part, the percentage working for free was on the side of women artists whose free work and self-exploitation eventually nourishes the art market.

In 1997 the Austro-French philosopher André Gorz wrote a book called Reclaiming Work, some passages from which I would like to quote.

Gorz writes:

"Post-Fordist capitalism has taken over Stalin’s formula: 'man is the most precious capital', as 'human capital', as fixed human capital". And then he raises a question: "How is capitalism to function when the most important types of capital [knowledge capital] cannot be owned?" And gives examples of how capitalism offers the answers: by "the 'individual enterprise', in which 'man' treats himself as capital and valorizes himself as such". (He mentions that the ‘elites of knowledge workers' which form part of the 4% of American workers together earn as much as half (51%) of all employed persons. It has some resonance with Piketty’s numbers). And the second answer: "is proposed by the big corporations: they take possession of ‘human capital’ by reestablishing pre-capitalist – and, indeed, almost feudal – relation of vassalage and allegiance".
Important to mention, that anthropologist David Graeber in his books Debt: The First 5000 Years (2011), and Bullshit Jobs (2018) calls it not 'almost feudal', but just feudal relations. (By the way, as a kind reminder, all the books that contextualize our calls can be found/ downloaded from our Telegram Channel).

Soon Gorz writes a conclusion:

In the end, the self-employed work at rates and in conditions which employed workers would find unacceptable. /…/ they "can achieve a decent level of income only by working a great many hours and they are more liable than employed workers to fall below the poverty line.
(Gorz, Reclaiming Work, 1997, p.51)

MB: So let’s formulate it like this: for the next round of the Open Call for AIR InSILo we are looking for works about work. Reflections on the conditions of artistic production and alternative possibilities. Reflections on oneself being placed in the residency environment. Ideas about and interventions in the different spaces we can provide: Online spaces and offline spaces. Physical spaces and imaginary spaces. Indoor spaces and outdoor spaces. Private spaces and public spaces. Real spaces and fantasy spaces.
We are looking for ideas and concepts that can go beyond the usual limitations of artistic resources and expand the scope of action. Art should be able to develop freely and without constraints, but this requires the persistent and critical insistence of artists on free and unhindered development. It is a matter of overcoming the shackles and power structures of the art market and opening up spaces for alternative models of living and working. It is about self-empowerment.
The Open Call "(Un)limited artistic resource" is an attempt by AIR InSILo to create such a space in theory and practice, together with the invited artists. In order to counteract the precarious working conditions we described at the beginning, we decided to offer a simplified and economical two-stage selection process: In the first step, we invite artists to apply with an idea, a preliminary sketch or a rough concept that addresses the questions described above, accompanied by documentation of previous work (portfolio or link to a website). From these, we will select a shortlist of about ten submissions that we will ask to flesh out the ideas and concepts and work on them in more detail. This work will be rewarded with a small allowance (€80) and the final residency places will be awarded from these more concrete proposals. The main criteria are innovative ideas for artistic work, taking into account alternative resources and the diversity of real and imaginary spaces that the residency can offer. We specifically encourage submissions by performance artists, sound artists and artists working in institutional critique and conceptual art.

KY: So, let’s say, we are flirting with the idea of universal basic income and making first steps to implement and promote this model to other residencies. The importance of UBI was widely discussed across all the texts we are referencing, and the first steps in this direction have been already done, like in 2022 in Ireland.

From Gorz:
Granting each citizen a sufficient social income follows the opposite logic: the aim is not to force the recipients to accept any kind of work on any terms whatsoever, but to free them from the constraints of the labour market. The basic social income must enable them to refuse work and reject ‘inhuman’ working conditions. And it must be part of a social environment which enables all citizens to decide on an ongoing basis between the use-value of their time and its exchange value: that is so to say between the ‘utilities’ they can acquire by selling their working time and those they can ‘self-provide’ by using that time themselves.
(Gorz, Reclaiming Work, 1997, p.83)

And also there:

To change society, we have to change ‘work’ – and vice versa. To change it by divesting it of all its reifying constraints (hours, hierarchy, productivity), which reflect its subordination to capital and which, so far, have determined the essence of what is currently known as ‘work’. To change it by reconciling it with a culture of daily life, an art of living, which it would both extend and nourish, instead of being cut off from them. /…/ To change it from childhood onwards by linking the acquisition of knowledge with pride in being able to do things. /…/ Work, study, experiment, exchange, artistic practice and personal fulfilment would all go hand in hand here, with people quite naturally being accorded a basic income at the end of adolescence./…/ ‘Work’ might then become quite naturally one of the dimensions of life, accompanied by and alternating with a range of other activities in which ‘productivity’ is not a consideration, though those activities would contribute indirectly to the productivity of labour by way of the creative, imaginative and expressive capacities they developed.”
(Gorz, Reclaiming Work, 1997, p.99)


Further reading:
Paul Lafargue, The Right to Be Lazy: And Other Writings, 1883.
Bertrand Russell, In praise of idleness and other essays, 1935.
Thomas Piketty, Arthur Goldhammer, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, 2013.
Thomas Piketty, Arthur Goldhammer, Economics of Inequality, 2015.
David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, 2011.
David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, 2018.
Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? 2009.
https://hyperallergic.com/45760/wage-interview/

Accelerating
degrowth

May 2022

KY: For the next round of AIR InSILo call, I would propose discussing the following: to meditate on the present state of technology and think about how the projects of artists working on the fringe of art and science can contribute to the very space of the residence. But to continue this, I would like to determine a clear framework for this discussion. So what would this contribution mean?
Since we agreed to define art as a basic need, we put it on the same level as other basic needs, be it food, water, shelter, clothing, safety, or security. It is essential to say that the concept of 'basic need' was synthesised by the UN's International Labour Organization to define and fight poverty. Let's say we don't necessarily need to take the optics of those who are sitting in Geneva deciding about poverty and will agree that art or creativity has enormous importance for a living being, let's say in Greaber's meaning-making category. This we agree and put out of brackets.
So the task of the residence which a space, an entity, a future community that urges us to be aware of consumption, energy, climate, equality, etc. issues and important to say: in a non-capitalist way (we do not aim to create any surplus value out of the produced commodities) is to provide a proper environment, where the potential of the artists working there could be maximally rendered. It would mean we need very particular decisions on the model of our work: be it circular economy, alternative economic models as a barter system, usage of decentralised tools or technologies, usage of specific alternative sources of energy, green systems, and so on. So here we come to the crucial moment if we speak about technology, which strategy to choose? Shall we focus and put in the centre of our discussion the clash of two approaches: degrowth and acceleration?

MB: We define AIR InSILo as "another kind of space: isolated from urban pollution, obligations, productivity, deadlines and generic motivations. Focused on the local community's interests and the calm scrupulous research of hidden layers of the average and unremarkable countryside area instead. By this, AIR InSilo wants to facilitate a safe environment for recharge from burnouts and provide black soil for new creativity sprouts." (AIR InSILO concept).
This may sound very much like a degrowth concept: 'deceleration' (slowing down, German: 'Entschleunigung'). In contrast, accelerationists recognise that technology is a crucial driver of social and economic change. Aaron Vasintjan, an environmental scientist and philosopher, co-editor of "Uneven Earth", debates in his essay "Accelerationism… and degrowth? The Left's strange bedfellows" the question of speed an refers to the foremost "philosopher of speed", Paul Virilio: "Through Paul Virilio's ("Speed and Politics") eyes, the history of Europe's long emergence out of feudalism into 20th-century modernity was one of increasing metabolism of bodies and technologies. [...] What's important for this discussion is that Virilio does not separate the two types of speed: changing social relations also meant changing metabolic rates—they are the same and must be theorised simultaneously".
So one keyword for our research is 'speed' or 'velocity'. Another one: is the 'size of the space'. And how they are interrelated, respectively defining each other. For example, solar panels: with the prospect of producing energy for mining, should contribute to a lesser economic dependency on funding, which would mean spending less time writing applications and having more time for creative and productive work within the residency frame.
BUT, again, Aaron Vasintjan: "efficiency doesn't work that way. If you would take away one lesson from ecological economics, it is this golden rule to be repeated to every techno-optimist you come across: without limiting in some way the use of resources and energy (e.g. by taxing it), any advance in efficiency will likely lead to progressively more resource use, not less. This is called the rebound effect, or Jevons' Paradox." How to avoid this trap? In the case of solar energy, not just to feed it into new gadgets or devices, but to comprehend it as an investment in our time economy.
Same with automatisation of any kind. I clearly favour accelerationists' envision of a fully automated communism by leaving us to four hours working week, but any proof that this can be implemented is still missing. On the contrary, as Graeber describes, although technically possible, it tends to lead to more working hours and bullshitization of jobs.
Can we eventually find a small scale system for AIR InSILo, which would work for our residents and us, and how would ideas in this direction develop? Can there be a conception and eventual implementation of an artistic network system based on commons, at least partially building up on Vilém Flusser's utopia of democratisation of society through networks, where you can permanently participate in politeia from home; something he very well described in "Something about roofless and wallless houses with different cable connections" from 1989, which - technically - is state of the art now?
And a very crucial point in our current situation: the war has shown clearly how vulnerable any global economy is and how deeply it affects the individual lives of people, even tens of thousands of kilometres away (for example, an upcoming hunger crisis in African countries because of export stops in Russia and Ukraine). We have to admit that the development of every single technology we use was spurred by weapon technology (or the porn industry, yes).
So technology isn't neutral, and by using it, we are no longer innocent. A sad insight shared by many media artists of the first generations, who were given access to high-end technology at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique) or other labs without any restrictions - only to find out that later on some of their (artistic) developments were used by the army (as a prominent example during Gulf war) which were the main sponsors of these labs. Something which the Austro-Canadian pioneer of media art, Robert Adrian X, often

Ahead of the new AIR InSILo 2022/2023 round, Ksenia Yurkova and Martin Breindl debate the present condition of technology in its conceptual domain and its possible use for the autonomy of the residence space.

emphasised and transferred to the contemporary use of the Internet or cell phones when speaking about his artistic work with technology.
For Vasintjan, the core question is: "what does accelerationism mean in the context of a war machine that has historically thrived on speed, logistics, and the conquest of distance? Is non-violent acceleration possible, and what would class struggle look like in that scenario?"
Maybe circular economy and care work as a pair (both terms of degrowth) to create feedback loops of materials and ideas through increased attentiveness and care.

KY: I will start from the very end of your statement. You are correct in pointing out that war has for a long time seduced thinking of what we now call right accelerationists as the most efficient way to speed up progress and to get rid of all redundant. Not to mention that they perceived the warfare tech as the avant-garde of progress; this is the beast we need to feed to have an intelligent and peaceful toaster in our kitchens. But let's assume that this type of thinking is profoundly wrong at its core and deserves nothing more than to be left to rot in the debris of Cyberia.
Avoiding libidinal drives of military complexes, we will focus on the left accelerationism that has proposed its way of thinking about technology as something that should serve society, not corporations. To make it simple: imagine you have a useful app that is not profiting from hooking your attention and time to sell it to the advertisers. Here we speak about the radical democratisation of technology following concepts by Chantal Mouffe mentioned in her writing "Hegemony, radical democracy, and the political." This can be seen as a control of the society, not corporations, over technologies; the attempts to achieve it exist in the digital domain and the open-source movement. Tiziana Terranova explains the process in the article "Red Stack Attack! Algorithms, Capital and the Automation of the Common."
She proposes a concept of the "Red Stack" – a new nomos for the post-capitalist common. It involves engaging with (at least) three levels of socio-technical innovation: virtual money, social networks, and bio-hypermedia. In the text "Accelerate: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics" by Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek, one can read the following passage: "We believe the most important division in today's Left is between those that hold to a folk politics of localism, direct action, and relentless horizontalism, and those that outline what must become called an accelerationist politics at ease with a modernity of abstraction, complexity, globality, and technology. The former remains content with establishing small and temporary spaces of non-capitalist social relations, eschewing the real problems entailed in facing foes that are intrinsically non-local, abstract, and rooted deep in our everyday infrastructure. The failure of such politics has been built-in from the very beginning. By contrast, an accelerationist politics seeks to preserve the gains of late capitalism while going further than its value system, governance structures, and mass pathologies will allow."
The authors outline the problem by mentioning that they do not seek to destroy the material platform of neoliberalism but to repurpose it to the common ends. They do not believe that technology is the only answer but do not object to quantification. But the achievement of the post-capitalism condition is drawn peculiarly. Their To Do tablet rests on several pillars: intellectual infrastructure, media, raising funds ("from governments, institutions, think tanks, unions, or individual benefactors"), mobilisation of the precariat, and a Promethean politics enclosing this structure. I will remind you – Prometheanism is an environmental orientation that perceives the Earth as a resource repository for human needs; it opposes the direction of either deep ecology perceiving the environment as an interconnected system of human and non-human actors, or the egalitarian model of eco-feminism. Onwards, the manifesto suggests abandoning openness, horizontality, and inclusion and turning to secrecy, verticality, and exclusion to make the political action effective. Surprisingly another influential thinker Antonio Negri supports this passage, reading it as "a sort of 'ecology of organisations,' insisting on a framework of multiple forces that come into resonance with each other and therefore manage to produce engines of collective decision-making beyond any sectarianism.' Well, debatable, isn't it? Yet, I do not want to sound as radical as another prominent scholar Isabelle Stengers, for whom this approach of accelerationism with its "speeding up to cross a threshold of capitalist exploitation" is nothing more than "trash of the male chauvinist pigs." She, in the paper "The Cosmopolitical Proposal," is referring to the Greek transcript of Deleuzian conceptual character of an 'idiot', the one who is slowing down the process; and in the work "Cosmopolitics" points at the importance of avoiding both speeding up and mobilisation, to slow down, to achieve "multi-critter thinking, caring for entanglement, learning the art of paying attention." This sounds tempting, but such a view on science and technology is scandalously counter-capitalist, even in the sense that none of the investors would ever be interested in something that doesn't offer a technological revolution in the foreseeable future and makes it almost inaccessible in the realm of fast profit.
I see a significant problem in this aforementioned generic division of accelerationism and degrowth: whereas one seems to render itself in abstract slogans of mobilisation without proposing tactical movements, another proposes rapid measures without answering more critical questions about alternatives. Let's agree that as it can appear to be narrow-minded to perceive accelerationism as speeding up, it can be identical mistakenly to perceive degrowth as slowing down. What if we perceive accelerationism as intensification? For me, the most crucial proposal will be to point to the intensification of thinking. Whereas by 'slowing down' we could mean reconsideration of time and speed and purpose of labour, production and consumption.

MB: Bruno Latour also refers to Isabelle Stengers, developing the idea that "economics has to be disenchanted". In his dissertation "Plantes animées. De la production aux relations avec les plantes", 2020, the anthropologist Dusan Kasic suggests "never to accept that any given topic has 'an economic dimension'." Because this implies that there is a deep, essential, vital reality (or truth) - the economic - and only if there is time and space one could consider "other dimensions" (ecological, social, moral, political, among others). It would imply that economy is the basis of all thinking and acting – thus giving the economy a hegemonic power over every other approach.
We spoke about the limitation of accelerationism if we comprehend it in a capitalist framework. Latour's/Kazic's denial of an 'economic dimension' can be sympathetically approved if we define this dimension as capitalist. But does it mean to turn away from any economic thinking? Can something sustainably exist without an economic grounding?

If we see accelerationism and degrowth from an anti-capitalist angle – shall we omit the economic aspect at all? Or shall we think about alternative economics? You mentioned commons. It is also a perfect example of what sounds good in (leftist) theory but what faces extraordinary difficulties in practice in a capitalist society.
I have the feeling that William's and Srnicek's critique of degrowth is rooted in the fact that this "folk politics in localism" is functioning very well and efficiently (of course, only on a small scale), whereas the accelerationist idea is prone to take a rapid turn into the neoliberal right. And here we are, of course, building up a local community which sustains itself by growing all the food it needs on its land doesn't solve the problem of exploitative labour conditions worldwide. Developing a horizontal digital network on the base of commons sold after many years of (self-exploitative) coding to Google or Meta doesn't either. Both find themselves in the trap of (subconscious?) capitalist thinking.
If we take your suggestion of thinking acceleration as intensification and slowing down as reconsiderations as points of departure, I can think of creating keywords in both realms that are linked (or glued) together to show that the one isn't possible without the other.
Also, here we may have to re-think my question about size. And also to maybe comprehend localism differently. Latour points out that the adjective 'local' is misleading because it continually defines sth as 'small' in comparison to a – quantitative larger – situation (actually, terms of mapping). But in territorial thinking, territory reaches as far as the interaction with all the others on whom we depend – and not farther. 'Near' is not defined as the quantitative, measurable distance but as "what touches me immediately (directly) or keeps me alive." It is a measure of engagement and intensity (Latour). It's an obligation (Stengers) towards the beings we depend on (the more we depend on, the more precisely we can describe them) and the ability to meet/ to encounter them, regardless of how far (in kilometres) they are.
This doesn't contradict Leopold Kohr's concept of localism but updates it so that 'global' and 'local' – the traditionally antagonistic pair – can also be comprehended differently. Let's see them in terms of interwovenness and measure them in density, which would mean that global and local may coincide/ overlap sometimes. Not necessarily, but it can happen.
So accelerationism (attributed to the 'global') and degrowth (attributed to the 'local') may also overlap. One has to be attentive to find their contact zones.

KY: I am catching up on your proposal about key concepts. I like that intensity starts to bridge already several essential aspects. It avoids producing the megalomaniac inflated but hollow ideas but doesn't limit itself to surrounding with immense potential to resonate on farther distances. Another significant common for both sides is care. For me, it is promising not from the point of view of gendered unpaid labour. It is generally about work devoted to sustenance, reproduction, relations and the creation of a proper umwelt for playfulness. I want to imagine that playfulness is a state of mind at its peak of creativity. It doesn't suffer obligations, scarcity or fear. It is carefree. If only one can be simultaneously aware and carefree.
I mean, awareness that someone or something has created this carelessness that you could unleash yourself. This, for me, is a perfect condition of intensity. It is a promise of a breakthrough. And honestly, I like it more than a notion of conviviality dropped by Ivan Illich (in his book "Tools for Conviviality" from 1972, almost the same year when E.F. Schumacher published his "Small is Beautiful" about the appropriate technology). Playfulness contains action at its core, a clear drive, and strong potency. And, as you deliberately pointed out, this state can be secured by a particular economic condition. About that, funny enough, the adepts of degrowth and acceleration have a consensus: about commons, basic income and communal currencies that have their general idea that the distribution of an economy's wealth must begin by ensuring that everyone has 'enough' to live with dignity.
So to wrap up our long dialogue, or, on the contrary, to open it to the further inputs, I would like to formulate what kind of artistic and curatorial contributions we are looking for:
– which work with, use, and critically discuss technology in an Anti-Promethean and anti-capitalist way, and in this sense, can bridge the gap between accelerationist and degrowth concepts.
– have the idea of intensity at their core, in its meaning of work devoted to sustenance, reproduction, relations and the creation of a proper umwelt for playfulness.
– which are based on or integrating awareness and care as a substantial part of artistic practice.
– which intensify thinking and slow down the speed and purpose of labour, production and consumption.
– which can disenchant economics and consider ecological, social, political, a.o. dimensions as a base of artistic practice.
– which can contribute to the sustainability of the residency by involving different levels of socio-technical innovation.

Further reading:
Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony, Radical Democracy, and the Political, 2013.
#Accelerate, The Accelerationist Reader. Edited by Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian, 2014.
Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality, 1973.
Degrowth. A vocabulary for a new era. Edited by Giacomo D’Alisa, Federico Demaria and Giorgos Kallis, 2015.
Isabelle Stengers, Cosmopolitics I (Posthumanities, Band 9), 2010.
David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, 2018.
Ernst Friedrich Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered, 1973.
Bruno Latour, After Lockdown: A Metamorphosis, 2021.
Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics, 1986.
Vilém Flusser, Something about roofless and wallless houses with different cable connections, 1989.
Aaron Vansintjan, Accelerationism… and degrowth? The Left's strange bedfellows, 2017:
http://unevenearth.org/2017/01/accelerationism-and-degrowth/
http://en.howtopedia.org/
https://www.appropedia.org/
Double Take [4]: Robert Adrian im Gespräch mit Martin Breindl (German only), 2011. https://vimeo.com/159169349