Liquid Architecture

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Sam Kidel: Becoming Unquantifiable

Sat, 11. Aug 2018
Public Office
225 Queensberry St
Carlton VIC 3053
5pm
FREE

Human worth is increasingly defined in measurable quantities. Our data is harvested for profit through social media platforms and web browsing activity. We are made precarious by working conditions that require us to be flexible entrepreneurs of the self. Perhaps worse than the expectation that we must market ourselves to possible employers, is the sense that we must also demonstrate our quantifiable qualities to our peers. Psychologists have found that in this neoliberal era, what they call 'socially-oriented perfectionism' has increased, leading to anxiety and paranoia. Our acceptance of these conditions is a matter of survival, but the complicity of movements like the 'Quantified Self', which promotes power through continuously quantifying the self, turns what might be a partial survival strategy into a new mode of defining human worth.

So how do we resist such conditions? I suggest that the first step is in becoming unquantifiable; recovering a sense of self beyond the limits of our data-set, and feeding the parts of ourselves that are squashed by these neoliberal conditions.

In this workshop, we will together make public 'profiles' of ourselves that are unquantifiable. We will take photographs of ourselves that make us invisible to facial recognition software, and recordings of our voices that are unintelligible to voice recognition software. Through these (often silly) practices of self-representation, we will ask: what would it feel like to become unquantifiable?

To RSVP: info@liquidarchitecture.org.au

Artists

Sam Kidel
"I dial a number into the phone. Someone picks up, and I follow the script. In between words, saliva rolls around my mouth folding around air pockets that pop quietly. The person on the other end of the line breathes more heavily than I expect, occasionally blowing directly into the phone handset, rattling the microphone and sending the sound of a strong gale down the wires of their telephone line. The sound travels through the microphone, into the grid, across vast networks of wires, into the call centre, through the telephone speaker cone and into my ear. I almost feel the warmth of their breath on the back of my neck."