Precarious Life 2.0

Precarious Life 2.0

June 24th -
July 15th, 2017

Media artist duo Anxious to Make, Liat Berdugo and Emily Martinez, opens a new solo exhibition Precarious Life 2.0 at The Luminary.

Opening Reception:
June 24th from 7 - 10pm

Inside the bowels of the third industrial revolution -- where industry meets crowdsourcing, where digital requests meet physical labor -- lies the so-called "sharing" economy.

In the revelatory space of this so-called sharing, our laundry is done at the tap of a button; our groceries are delivered from the corner store; we hire others to wait in ticket queues; and we have finally learned how to carpool -- or rather, to use the properly commercialized term -- to Uberpool. "For-profit “sharing” represents by far the fastest-growing source of un- and under-regulated commercial activity," wrote Noam Scheiber. Meanwhile, the income gap widens between the entrepreneur, the user, and the lowly serf who executes errands under precarious work conditions masked by the phraseology of sharing.

Thus, in this conglomeration of cyber-disautomation and task-farming, we find ourselves anxious to make more: more money, more clicks, more friends, more love, more tweets, more shows, more papers, more projects, more ideas, more originality, more experiences. We -- Liat Berdugo and Emily Martinez -- formed the two-person artist collective “Anxious to Make” in order to aggregate this anxiety for more and to harness it produce work through the sharing economy itself. How can we, as artists and cultural producers, make works that comment on and shape the state of the sharing economy through the systems of this capitalist marketplace?

In partnership with Precarious Life 2.0 Anxious To Make (Liat Berdugo + Emily Martinez) will lead a design thinking workshop and ideation session on the sharing economy at Venture Cafe. The workshop will include a short screening of research-informed video work, and an interactive survey interrogating audience-goers on their ideas of the sharing economy and the future of work. The goal of this workshop will be to structure and interrogate larger conversation about labor and new economies.

The Luminary's exhibitions are supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Regional Arts Commission, the Missouri Arts Council and our members.