Sustainability of Labour within Organized Networks

Tyzlik-Carver, Magda (2011) Sustainability of Labour within Organized Networks. In: Textures: 6th Meeting of the Society for Literature, Science and Arts, 15 – 19 June 2010, Riga, Latvia.

Abstract / Summary

Rossiter (2006) claims in his book that organized networks have the capacity to organise labour and he places this “capacity” in direct relation with the problem of sustainability for organized networks. In this paper I want to consider these issues through the example of playing practice – a curatorial project which I co-initiated, which is formed as a small socio-technological network and based on collaborative research. I will engage in this task from the position of a curator of playing practice, performing what Joasia Krysa terms “immaterial curating” (2008b) thus recognising the problems and tensions exposed by this concept, namely ‘the existing tension between the “’collectivity’ of the production process and a tendency to preserve ‘control’ over it” (2008b, p. 92). Such an understanding of this type of curating as situated in the context of immateriality is useful in bringing the attention to the labour involved in the curatorial process and labour “invested in the works themselves” (2008b, p. 92). Consequently, my aim in this paper is to think of sustainability in relation to the labour that constitutes organized networks, thus proposing that it is through sustainability of labour that the organized networks can be sustained.

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