Matriz de coherencia

As we consider the above implications, we are still not convinced that our plan for The Cabaret Commons is completely unredeemable. However, it seems necessary to foreground and thematize the conditions in which we as academics, artists, audiences and organizers are labouring and to potentially use the site as a place to study these relations. We hope to use this project as a site in which we innumerate a methodology to account for the potentially exploitative labour relations of being studied and their particularly acute resonances in the context of online work. We are not sure that the need to create a space and opportunity to

bring researchers, artists and other cultural produsers together to concentrate on the conditions of our labour is worth the risk of submitting our affective and immaterial work to academic and Web 2.0 economies of surveillance and data mining. However, if it were, the following are some components that might enable and provoke the sort of interventions for which we have some hope. To begin, we will implement various accounting measures in which all contributors to the Cabaret Commons clock the hours that they put into the site (including the time that they put into clocking their hours) in order to get a better sense of how much labour this kind of user-generated content actually requires. Another measure will ask participants, including ourselves, to (anonymously) make transparent their economic situation in order to draw attention to the ranges of economic disparities and realities at play in academic-artist ‘collaborations’. This measure will include questions like:

1. What do you do for work?

2. Do you get paid for all of that work?

3. Did you go to school or need specialized training in order to do your work?

3.1 If yes, what was that degree, certificate or training and how did you pay for it?

4. Do you have a reliable income?

4.1 If yes, how much money do you make each month?

4.2If not, what is the range of your income each month in the past two years?

5. Do you take extra jobs to supplement the pay you receive from your primary work?

6. How many jobs/contracts have you had in the past two years?

7. Have you received a grant in the past 5 years? Artist or academic grant? How much?

7.1 If it was an academic grant, how much money did you allot to distribute to artists/organizers involved with your project? How was the other money spent (i.e. stipends, travel, supplies)?

7.2 If it was an artDst grant, how much money did you allot to

documentation and archiving? How was the other money spent (i.e. stipends, travel, supplies)?

8. Approximately how much do you pay in monthly expenses?

9. Approximately how much do you pay in debt repayment each month?

10. Excluding mortgage or car loans, how have you accumulated your debt and how is it distributed (art production debt, student loans, living expenses, impulse buying)?

11. Do you rent or own your home? In either case, please describe your economic relationship to your home (mortgage/rent payments, utilities, taxes, etc.)

12. Do you have roommates? If yes, why? If no, why not?

13. Do you own a car? If yes, please describe your economic relationship to your car (car payments, gas costs, maintenance, etc.)

14. Have you ever received a significant family inheritance? If yes, for how much and what did you do with it?

15. When was the last time you travelled for vacation that you paid for? 16. Do you do any ‘work’ for which you are not financially remunerated?

Why?

17. How have your race, gender, sexuality, disabilities, class, body size, citizenship, and/or education level impacted your financial situation?

18. Have you participated in any other form of online archiving, or

artist/activist networking project? If yes, what did you get or learn from it?

19. Why are you participating in this project?

20.What, if anything, do you hope to get out of this project?

21. Do you think other people involved in this project will benefit more or less than you? Why?

22. Please describe the working conditions of your participation in this project. Do you think they are fair?

22.1 Would you like to change these conditions? If yes, how?

Finally, we will ask participants after each session how much, or how, they think they should be paid for the labour that they contributed during that session. Marx’s ‘Workers’ inquiry’, the Autonomists’ participant action research and Brown and Quan-Haase’s ‘A workers’ inquiry 2.0’ seek to raise their research subjects’ consciousness about the working conditions outside of their studies thereby obfuscating the work of the study itself. We hope that introducing these accounting measures within our project will flip the gaze such that the researcher’s labour conditions will be as subject to study as the workers’, thereby centring the material conditions and relations of the immaterial labours that constitute the Arts and Humanities research shop floor.

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the authors

T.L. Cowan is the FemTechNet Chair for Experimental Pedagogies in the School of Media Studies at The New School in New York City. Cowan has a manuscript in progress entitled Sliding Scale: Translocal Grassroots Cabaret Cultures in Mexico City, Montreal and New York City.

Email: [email protected] Website: www.tlcowan.net

Jasmine Rault is an Assistant Professor in Culture and Media at Eugene Lang College at The New School in New York City. Rault’s first book is Eileen Gray and the design of sapphic modernity: Staying in (2011, Ashgate)

Email: [email protected]

Cowan and Rault write collaboratively on themes of trans- feminist and queer cultural economies and politics and have new work forthcoming in Women’s Studies Quarterly on racialized queer debt and the politics of history-making and (with Dayna McLeod) Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media and Technology on designing trans-feminist and queer online archives.

ISSN 1473-2866 (Online) ISSN 2052-1499 (Print) www.ephemerajournal.org volume 14(3): 489-509