Labor Zero Labor
Launch of the Labor Zero Labor program: performances, talk shows, sitcoms, video programming, literature, music, poetry…
A project by Benjamin Valenza, in collaboration with Triangle France.
With the support of Fondation d’entreprise Ricard, DRAC Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, Conseil Régional Provence Alpes-Côte d’Azur, Conseil départemental des Bouches-du-Rhône, Ville de Marseille, Pro Helvetia, École d’Enseignement Supérieur d’Art de Bordeaux, SCIC Friche la Belle de Mai, Mécènes du Sud, Caparol, Château Lacoste, Picto Mediterranée, Code Magazine.
4th floor - Tour Panorama, Friche la Belle de Mai or live on www.l-0-l.tv
Image design: Leny Lecointre
Guest project: Poésie Plate-forme / Fondation d’entreprise Ricard
Video program curated by: Caterina Riva
Manifesto:
Circa 1980, Andy Kaufman didn’t hesitate to introduce black screens in the middle of his television show The Going-Too-Far-Corner. Misunderstood by the channel directors who feared a loss of viewers, he closes the show with a “bye bye!” followed by a shot that leads the viewer into a middle-class living room where a couple, sitting in front of a television spilling out of the frame, wonder: “And what is he doing now?” To which the woman responds with a gesture inviting a relaxed approach, “Oh, he’s playing with the medium!”
If television was still a material object at the time, influencing the orientation of domestic space and reflecting, in negative, the organization of our work time, the play in question already lies “between the images*”. This phrase, coined by Raymond Bellour ten years later, describes the nature of the new images produced by distribution media as a place of passage, a movement acting between the stillness of painting and photography, and the movement inherent to cinema and video. Between figuration and dispersion. Even back then, this 24/7 active flow in the accelerators of diffusion, such as television transmission methods, imposed itself on the viewer by its particularity as a space without space. Yesterday, via radio waves, and today online, this flow is more than ever impossible to capture or stop. It has no beginning, no end, no geographical coordinates, and in front of it, each of us becomes both a receiving screen and a transmitter… we are mobile, portable, integrated, connected, accelerated.
In this acceleration predicted by Raymond Bellour, and perhaps in an effort to avoid leaving information floating without ever anchoring the foundation that ties the elements together, new distribution channels are situational: the content shared is tied to a user account, preferences, and browsing history. There always seems to be a model, an anecdote, a strategy, a group behind the distributed content. However, if the message has no address, it is not without specificity, as it is organized by ecosystems where algorithmic programming regularly sets traps for us. Today, even the slightest of our activities or productions feeds an increasing number of algorithms to the point that it is futile to try to designate these writings or their data. However, within this commercial space, the distance that once existed between the technology and the public has narrowed. Yesterday, the remote control made us programmers, a situation reinforced once television became a transgenre entity whose distribution must be compatible with all broadcasting platforms. Today, beyond programming, access to production and live broadcasting is widely available and brings together a multitude of amateur communities, actions, attitudes, and writings not subject to moderation. Bellour already said: “everything, really everything, passes through television*,” all types of content, artistic or not, merge into the same flow, viewed at the discretion of the spectator-programmer’s desires.
In 2014, with the project Performance Proletarians*, we borrowed this term from Diedrich Diederichsen to designate, along with him, the new (creative) class that appeared with the new technological conditions of circulation and dissemination of artistic content. A class that no longer functions only as “labor force, but as a force of life, deploying the products of its creative activity through a continuous flow of energy, agility, charm, and talent.” In these deregulated and de-professionalized conditions, television is no longer the negative of our work time; it is everywhere, in real time, dematerialized. Since the medium is now available, it is time to play with the message.
Today, we believe that the relationship of contemporary artistic practices to new mass media can no longer exist in the conditions of exteriority that were still conceivable in the recent past. It is now about occupying this mainstream and amateur position, joining existing communities, imitating rather than opposing, and creating a space where artists not only negotiate a program, but take charge of the entirety of an alternative television medium and distribute their work within it.
This medium is LABOR ZERO LABOR.
Playing with the ideas of “entertainment” and “event” that surround the image of live television, as well as the recent tension created by new social networks for live broadcasting, LABOR ZERO LABOR acts on how this dissemination can change our understanding of the culture of speech in the public space.
Beyond the relationship between performance and entertainment technology, LABOR ZERO LABOR focuses on an ecosystem linked to a post-media community with its own autonomy, its own methods of live action, and its own programming language. For in the neoliberal system described by Diederichsen, every participant, regardless of their position, can take part in the programming. It may be about determining a common project once again, alternative organic and social forms, and reviving that relational link so dear to the artists of the 1990s who were searching for new distributions of work time and leisure time. Television was then seen as a true social mediation device that allowed for relational weaving and the writing of a new narrative. It was the availability of the medium that was supposed to enable this new social arrangement. Today, in a context of technology accessible to all and deregulated work, we wish to focus on the experience of the screen and generate an aesthetic in a collaborative and open way. Writing a language in writing, conscious of the letting go imposed by the game of the algorithm.
Performances, talk shows, sitcoms, video programming, literature, music, poetry… Our program cannot be written like a manifesto. For the strength of television has always been “its ability to generate a confusion between description and prescription***.” This positive confusion, this link that allows contents to merge together, originates above all from a form of programming shared between the producer and the viewer. We see programming, whatever its form, whether through the remote control, the screen, the browser, or algorithms, as a risk-taking, a positive loss of control, a writing that self-generates.
We are all programmers. Within this flow and this community, there are no appointments or schedules, only the choice to connect, participate, and disconnect.
It is this original intertwining of content that we envision as the specific code of our programming. Beyond activism leading to pragmatic political considerations, LABOR ZERO LABOR primarily proposes to challenge the mechanisms of television and deploy the technical potential of the medium for a radical redistribution of its dissemination capacity.
Every broadcast by LABOR ZERO LABOR is a risky endeavor, and its appearance on screen is semi-clandestine. It is entertainment close to an impossible enterprise: in a virtual place, without space, in acceleration, but still managing to broadcast… It is complex to speak of artists’ media without drawing the almost quantum geography of these space-less places, all these projects, crashed against the wall of a precarious economy, or simply left on standby, like those late-night programs, well-known refuges for viewers who drift into impossible time slots. And yet, this is where this non-place is found, in situations that are impossible to tell, archive, or format… Rather than talking about it, let’s occupy it, produce it, program it, create it, and watch it on LABOR ZERO LABOR!!!
*Raymond Bellour, “L’Entre-Images”, Photo. Cinéma. Vidéo, La Différence, 1990, p. 33
** Diedrich Diederichsen, “On (Surplus) Value in Art”, 2008, Sternberg Press. See Performance Proletarians, a project by Lili Reynaud Dewar and Benjamin Valenza, Magasin CNAC, Grenoble, 2014.
*** Chus Martinez, “Television Atmosphere” in “Are you ready for TV”, MACBA / Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea – CGAC2010.
Detailed program:
Friday, August 26 - LIVE from 6PM to 10PM
6:00 PM - LIVE performance by Hannah Weinberger (40 min)
7:15 PM - TELL’N’TALK: Benjamin Thorel in conversation with Maeve Connolly (30 min)
8:00 PM - LIVE performance by New Noveta (12 min)
9:00 PM - Simple Music Tv (40 min / 1H)
Saturday, August 27 - LIVE from 2PM to 7PM
2:00 PM - TELL’N’TALK: Benjamin Thorel in conversation with Adeena Mey (40 min)
3:00 PM - POESIE PLATEFORME / FONDATION D’ENTREPRISE RICARD (1H)
PART 1 - Jérôme Mauche invites Amélie Giacomini and Laura Sellies
PART 2 - Jérôme Mauche invites Charles Pennequin
4:30 PM - LIVE performance by Richard John Jones (40 min)
5:45 PM - LIVE performance by Christian Falsnaes (40 min)
with Emy Chauveau
6:30 PM - LIVE performance by Geo Wyeth (40 min)
Sunday, August 28 - LIVE from 2PM to 7PM
Here’s the translation with the original formatting:
2:00 PM - TELL’N’TALK: Benjamin Thorel in conversation with Deborah Birch (30 min)
3:00 PM - SITCOM - Pragmatic Chaos by Virgile Fraisse (10 min)
3:10 PM - AUTOGESTION - No School But Your Love (50 min)
4:00 PM - SITCOM - Saga by David Perreard (10 min)
4:10 PM - AUTOGESTION - No School But Your Love (50 min)
5:00 PM - SITCOM - Pragmatic Chaos by Virgile Fraisse (10 min)
5:10 PM - VIDEO PROGRAM curated by Benjamin Valenza (20 min)
5:30 PM - LIVE performance by Silent Stream Corporation
Throughout the weekend:
Video program curated by Caterina Riva: Marco Belfiore / Paul Becker, Juliet Carpenter, Sorawit Songsataya, Tahi Moore, Bertrand Dezoteaux, George Egerton-Warburton, Tyler Coburn, Janet Lilo, Francesco Pedraglio