This document outlines the agenda and topics for discussion at the Former West Brown Bag event. It includes: discussions on art production and infrastructure in the digital age; the role and representation of artists online through CVs and social media; how technology like the internet provides visibility and accessibility for artists; and the social consequences of mass art production. Other topics mentioned include contemporary art definitions; the transformative nature of the current time period; and how to think critically about issues like post-colonialism and imagining other worlds.

1. Former West
Brown Bag
Portia Placino

2. Documents, Constellations,
Prospects
 Learning Place
 Art Production
 Infrastructures
 Insurgent Cosmopolitanism
 Dissident Knowledge

3. Strands of Participation
 Reading Timelines
 Société Réaliste
 From CV to Time Line: A Workshop on Labor and
Social Media
 Prof. D. Dieter Lesage
 How to Deal with What is Considered to be Art
Today
 Keti Chukrov
 Welcome to the “hood”
 Nina Fischer & Moroan el Sani

4. Learning Place:
Sivisation of Life

5. Who is an artist?
Defined by the CV para-text.

6. Société Réalisté
Reading Timelines

7. Representation and
Performance of the Self and
the Artist in the Contemporary
 Reading CVs and Timelines
 How should the artist represent themselves in
contemporary art and institutions?
 Constant and permanent performance of
immaterial labor (Negri) and social media
 Do we still sleep? Do we still rest from
performance?

8. Internet & Social Media Tools
This is not my life

9. Re-Politicize the
Issue of
Representation

11. Art Production in
the Age of
Internet & Social
Media

12. Medium of the Internet
 Computer/ Mobile Phones
 Observable
 Finite

13. What the Internet provides
 Potent visibility
 Accessibility
 Transparency

14. Points
 Password as contemporary subjectivity
 Hacker breaks the code of hermeneutics
 Cyborg as the secret of subjectivity
 Going beyond the panoptic
 Unbreakable encryption as the true utopia and
true subjectivity

15. Artist as
Blogger?
Return of the universal spectator

16. Lecture Performance
Hito Steyerl

17. I dreamed a dream

18. Art & Firearms
 Everyone is an artist
 Democratization of violence
 Deskilling
 Changed social order

19. Chasing Spring
The Spring that keeps us waiting.
Contemporary miserable.

20. What are the
social
consequences
of mass art
production?

21. Game Over?
Did the machine win?
The machine always win.

22. Rhetoric of the Future
 European collapse
 Catalan, Basque, Greece
 Final act of the neo-liberal
 Failure of the occupied movements
 Fragilization of empathy between human beings
 Salaries and debts to pay
 Precarization
 Precario bello

23. Is Facebook
empowering?
Is our friendship over?
Power in the cyberspace.

24. Is total art
possible?
Boris Groys & Qiu Zhijie
When is art contemporary?

25. Social Change
& Transformation

26. Flashpoints
 1832 (Steyerl)
 Student uprising against the regime (France), setting
of Les Miserables, serialized pulp fiction
 1977 (Bifo)
 Apple trademark, death of Charlie Chaplin,
genetically created human being, beginnings of
punk, modernism dissolved, beginnings of the
European collapse

28. Transformative nature of our
time similar to 1989
 Contemporary Moment
 Globalization
 Migrations, Citizenship, Diaspora
 Return of Religion
 Religious extremism
 Debate of good vs. evil
 Impact of Technology
 Internet
 Social media

29. Maria Hlavajova:
Propositions
 How do we think critically?
 Post-Colonial, Post-Communist, Imagining the
World Other
 Shifts and tilting balance
 Shifts in vocabularies
 Decentering Discourses