Resisting the Neo-liberal Rush to Digital

This piece of writing began in a raw and simple format, as a blog post on April 1st, 2020¹, twenty days after entering into a lockdown. I chose to record it at the time because as we were plunged into an unparalleled level of digital second life, a fatigue from reading email after email from every single organisation I had ever visited settled over me. Emails with the same tone and the same amount of words: empathetic, sorry, yet hopeful. Almost over-caring blocks of text I could barely fit in my screen shaped eyeballs. I, too, was guilty of sending these emails to artists from my position as the programmer of Basement Theatre. So, I stopped. Instead, I spoke out loud in a bid for relief, an alternative waveform, smoke signals to my fellow artists of colour - whose physical presence I was missing sorely.

Eighteen months after entering into a lockdown, I am astounded by the resilience of the artists around me. And I am pissed off at the arts sector (of which I am a very real part) that nothing seems to have changed. Following sector-wide conversations on how the system was broken to begin with, governing arts structures seem to be merrily bouncing back to the neo-liberal rhythms of projected box office models and paying everyone in an arts organisation except the artist.

I am in the privileged position of being able to create art and perform it live for audiences, as well being able to facilitate others to do the same. Still, I ineffectually cling to the smoke signals I sent at that time. If anything, the desire to see those signals received and answered has grown stronger. As writer Rosabel Tan says in her article, We Can Build A New Utopia: “We’re right to feel lucky. But we’re also right to want more.”²

This ‘call to rest’ is about art (of the live variety) and its relationship to digital spaces. It is also about the digital space and its relationship to artists of colour. About those  artists of colour and their relationship to living in, under and through, various lenses, from colonial to patriarchal. (Though, can those lenses ever really be separated?) What happens when neo-liberalism chooses your rhythm for you? How did we end up stuck on an internal treadmill of productivity? And how might we go about stepping off without feeling a devastating amount of guilt?

Neo-liberal structures that fail artists, especially artists of colour, in the physical world continue to fail them in the digital world - and will keep failing them unless power and privilege are examined at every level. What if, instead of rushing to a digital solution for the future of live performance, we took time to break down the economic and bureaucratic structures that house art in Aotearoa and ask these two questions: Are we simply repeating harmful structures and rhythms online? And what would it be like, in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, to rest and allow for a slow, gentle evolution of live performance to unfold - while paying utmost attention to the safety of QTBIPOC artists?

Stop.

Basement Theatre is a small, independent arts organisation and venue that sits at the deepest part of what used to be a significant stream in Tāmaki Makaurau, Aotearoa, called Te Waihoritiu. This stream was part of the 3000 acres of land gifted by Chief Apihai Te Kawau of Ngati Whatua to Governor Hobson in 1833 to create the city of Auckland. This gift was not used in the spirit with which it was given. It used to be wetlands. Now it is stolen land.

In bricks and mortar, the building is home to a boutique bar and two flexible performance spaces used by independent live performance makers in Tāmaki Makaurau. It hosts around 100 events, involving close to 500 artists, each year. My job is to take care of them. 

On Friday 20th March 2020, five days before entering into a lockdown, the roller door of Basement Theatre was shut and locked to the public indefinitely. As the programmer of the venue, I had roughly 50 out of the expected 500 artists that year at Basement Theatre under my care. I needed to communicate with them, in myriad ways, that a worldwide outbreak of a virus meant that their performances were cancelled and the building needed to be shut. I say ‘myriad’ because one blanket can’t cover everyone (also: some people don’t like blankets; others need five) and only a person with blanket privilege would assume that the un-blanketed would need or want one. I wanted to make sure that those artists had means to access some money, that they felt cared for, that they felt hopeful, and that they didn’t give up on a way of life that was already difficult to live.

In 2019, twelve months before entering into a lockdown, the median personal annual income for an artist in Aotearoa was $35,800 ($15,000, if you take away any other income sources)³. Artists live a high-risk life in the wage margins and spend most of their time proving that their choice of career is both valid and useful within the world. So, when a global pandemic puts a stop to all ‘non-essential’ services and requires the shutdown of the businesses that make the arts possible, you don’t need to stretch far to imagine the spike of self-doubt activated in an already fragile and volatile industry.

My first instinct, like that of many, was to encourage artists to throw everything they had online. Live stream; YouTube; Instagram; Zoom; whatever it was, they needed to get it set up as soon as possible and stay relevant to a society that already had suspicions about the artist’s purpose long before the COVID-19 pandemic. Theatre is a form that relies upon human beings together in proximity. It could not, would not, simply lie down and take this burn to its pride. The artform was haemorrhaging and needed a nurse.

I thought hard and quickly, but ultimately failed to instantly provide a digital lifeline for our artists, because as a third of the world found itself in lockdown, the internet felt like a problematic place to be. I’m a dedicated scroller of Instagram, a flipper of stories, and a dopamine hunter on Facebook. These are places I generally go to to connect with other POC and revel in my particular algorithms. These algorithms (which I imagine are snakes who are very good at maths) make sure I see other POC faces, bodies, anger, protests,  simply framed Audre Lorde quotes offering love and hope and safety. But on Friday March 20th, 2020, I felt less safe. The space for me to exist, to express the complex relationship between race, gender, art, and a global pandemic closed sharply around me. I was physically cut off from safety networks and the amount of xenophobes, mansplainers, and white feminists online had just tripled. As I scrolled through my newly disrupted algorithms, fending off beautifully appropriated lockdown online yoga practises online via the homogenous insta frames – the internet suddenly felt very crowded.

Prophets.

Digital artist/thinker/philosopher James Bridle, in his online address ‘Other Intelligences’⁴ talks about the idea that algorithms were invented to predict things like the weather. Over time, our dependence on digital fortune tellers grew so strong that we now willingly put our trust in digital maps to tell us where and when to turn next. This technology lulls us into following it blindly, while making us feel as if we were in control all along. His alarming use of ‘Death by GPS’ as an example of this trust is a bleak and comic reminder that machines are not perfect.

‘Death by GPS’ is the term park rangers in the United States use when people follow the little blue dot on their GPS without doubt and end up driving to places that they should not be. They may end up at dead ends, lost in Death Valley; or slowly sinking in the middle of a river, with desperate calls for help written in the dust of their windows. ‘Death by GPS’ is what happens when common sense is outsourced to technology. Rather than spending time using GPS in relationship with brains, bodies and navigational instincts; victims of this conundrum choose the easy route, one that reinforces a belief “that technology has better answers for us even if the result of that is driving into a lake.”⁵

When it comes to art and privilege, I am most interested in Bridle’s idea that prediction is bound up with power and control. Algorithms are mathematical formulas that predict patterns. Once that pattern is known, control can be exercised upon it. Preparations can be made for an incoming storm; products can be advertised based on your menstrual cycle. The worst of this control through prediction: those snakey algorithms trained to slither after attention and money via clickbait articles. Attention hungry, dopamine-filled clicks that lead to extremist content; extremist content that leads to “conspiracy theories, junk science, pseudo science, racism and misogyny.”⁶

Social spaces of the internet, coupled with clickbait, have exponentially sped up the process of individual radicalization (and radical individualism). It doesn’t take long for a person to venture down the left hand side of one argument, only to find themselves being seduced by the right. Less than six months after entering into a lockdown, we see this play out in the rise of a bogus far-right conspiracy network called QAnon.  On January 6th, 2021, eight months and twelve days after entering into a lockdown, this network storms the gates of the United States Capitol. 

Bridle points out that it is not so much the predictions or the technology you have to be careful of, it’s about who uses it and to what end.  Putting all of our effort into digital technology as having the means to “save us or bring us together in some more equitable or just world” implies that “there is one future that we’re all heading towards... if only we had the right maths we’d figure it out. Also it says that whoever has that maths will control that future.”⁷

As an artist of colour, I can't help but give the side eye to the Western pantheon of classic storytelling to find the voices who have long been in control of the maths behind who we should and should not believe. Prophets in classical literature tend to be shown as weak and feeble, or borderline hysterical.  Calpurnia turns up for all of two scenes in Julius Caesar, begging him to listen to her, Cassandra is punished by Zeus never to be believed.  To have the ability to predict the future surely is witchcraft, troubling and threatening, unless that ability is encased in something considered to be of lower status than a powerful white man.

There are many instances of the punishment of women for speaking up, for example, through the myths of the Greeks and Romans. Mary Beard’s Power and Women is an excellent collection of these moments: Penelope being sent to her bedroom by her young son for speaking in public, Io being turned into a mooing cow by the God Jupiter. These punishments are fixated on lowering the status of women, softening their state, domesticating their activities deeming whatever power they have left in the world useless. It is as if to say, if we are going to listen to the witchcraft of prediction, it must come to us in a non-threatening form, through the dulcet tones of Alexa or Siri, trapped in their machines, unable to access freedom and agency. It must be outside us, in something we believe to be either lesser than us or objectively neutral. How eerie then to think of the revenge played our by our ignored Grecian prophets, innocently leading us into Arizona deserts and rivers through digital maps that have yet to be updated.

Look Up.

It’s not about eradicating this technology; after all “we are here, right now, in this moment, talking to each other across the most extraordinary assemblage that humanity has ever put together.”⁸ What if, instead of thinking in an either-you're-with-us-or-against-us way, we concentrate on rethinking how technology works and who it is directed at. Bridle gives the beautiful example of the better than Hubbard-esque satellite built by the National Geo-Spatial Intelligence Agency (an organisation that specialises in giving advantages to policy makers and warfighters). This satellite was gifted to NASA after finding it surplus to requirements and NASA promptly turned it upside down. What began life as an agent of destruction, looking at the ground on behalf of its operators in order to annihilate life, has now been repurposed to look for new planets, stars and galaxies instead. A hopeful example as we watch the last of the US troops leave Afghanistan leaving behind a 20 year trail of colonial clutter.

Artists have a deep instinct for turning the world upside down. Through a residency at Basement Theatre, created in response to lockdown, artist Tru Paraha was given five months and a small stipend to continue her research in astro choreography and using the element of darkness. In Paraha’s art, the Māori concepts of Te Pō (the night) and Te Kore (the void) as choreo-spheres within which to practice movement, sound and post poetics. This highly experimental practice feels steeped in a return to indigenous star gazing, now commonly consumed in a largely digital experience of pop astrology.

Paraha used the residency to dive into the deep south (a trip that was delayed several times because of various lockdowns) and stare at the southern sky, looking for patterns to glean knowledge of the world, just as their ancestors would have. It’s from stargazing that Māori developed navigation systems, and ways of predicting weather patterns for growing crops and cultivating the land. Over time through the brutality of colonisation, this practice would have been eradicated were it not for the strength of indigenous oral storytelling, myth and performance rituals.

For certain, there is technology involved in Paraha’s research, which was made in collaboration with noise artist, Beth Dawson aka Ducklingmonster.  Dawson collected field recordings of soft mediums against hard surfaces, like water over stones, Te Waihoroitiu buried under the theatre, the wetlands that are now concrete. These sounds were layered to create an immersive environment and though the elements are liquid and solid, the effect is space and gas.  Paraha meanwhile combined her naked eye stargazing with constellation mapping apps and state of the art binoculars. These two artists, much like the scientists at NASA, reprupose spy-style technologies (field recorders, satellite info, binoculars) not to gain war like advatanges, but to plunge their audience into darkness and suspend them in the cosmos.

This residency was offered to artists as a pull against the rushing tide into digital space. Rather than focussing on displaying work outwards through any means possible, the proposal was made to take time, look inwards and rethink the opportunities handed over to artists and arts organizations in 2020. It was a maeuver used to provide slow and sustained support for artists to follow their bottomless instincts to relook at and remake the world around them. The question is not about whether or not to trust technology or digital spaces. The question is how can we build maneuvers to keep safe from an unstable and power-riddled network? Can we re-imagine the intended function of this space and think about who it is and is not directed at?

Up until Friday 20th March 2020, five days before entering into a lockdown, the online and digital life at its best was empowering. The internet made expression and community-building, especially for those who don't fit the mainstream, easy and free. Facebook and Instagram have made it simple for us to live as multiple versions of ourselves and artists can use this to set their own terms of how their art is made and distributed for little to no money.   Young brown comedians like Janaye Henry (11K followers)⁹ or Sieni Leo’Olo (8K followers)¹⁰ barely need to step foot onstage at all; so strong are their digital followings they could run their entire careers from the comfort of their living rooms.  No one can deny them the space they take up and although no one can stop the trollers in the comments, these two young women are able to dictate where, when and how they want to be seen.

For a long while, feminist artists and artists of colour have used these spaces, not only to connect, but to innovate and develop their art. They have figured out a way to hack those systems that have denied them visibility in the physical world, using social media to distill the art of persona and political conversations to their advantage. By persona, I mean that stage (or digital) presence that allows for multiple versions of the self to be expressed through performance. These versions of self live within the artist, as opposed to a character written by someone else that the artist puts on themselves.  A Facebook or Instagram profile is a persona - it is a performed part of yourself, one you feel happy conveying to the world. Your profile acts as your avatar with which you can join in the grand game networking across the world wide web.

The ready-to-use frames of Instagram provide an instant platform for multi-disciplined artists to create a body of work that can sprawl sideways across various mediums. The luminous work of Pati Tyrell is a rich example of how queer, brown artists are experts at it. Alongside being the youngest artist to ever be nominated for Aoteoroa’s prestigious Walters Prize, his Instagram profile¹¹ serves as an entirely accessible portrait gallery of queer, brown artists. Since 2013, seven years before entering into a lockdown, this  profile has perfected the art of persona as a way to increase visibility for a marginalised group of people. In this world they are not marginalised, they are demigods blooming through onto your newsfeed, “creating new counternarratives, challenging the current ones”¹² and interrupting your daily dose of influencer selfies. There is a freefall multiplicity to Tyrell’s portraits, offering the viewer palpable resistance to singular or binary notions of how it might feel to be brown and queer. Each persona stands alone and in relation to one another, epoxied by their relationship to Tyrell and separated only by the white grouting of Instagram’s tile-like layout.

On April 8th 2020, two weeks after entering into a lockdown, Pati and the collective FAFSWAG of which he is a co-founder will use their twitter account to talk about the politics of safety of the internet, a place they used since “day dot”¹³ to increase the visibility of brown, queer artists. 

FAFSWAG had already been artistically hacking live and digital performance spaces before funding bodies started pressuring artists to pivot. Perhaps most notable is their collaboration with the digital experience design studio Resn through NZ On Air, which resulted in a website that tied interactive gaming and documentary narratives to tell their stories.¹⁴ Carved out years prior to this moment of digital panic for performance artists, this exhibition of digital performance prowess signals how ahead of the game this community was and is. To them, the idea of spidery, multiplicitous, artistic entry points is like breathing. It’s clear from their response that they are digitally fluent and are capable of choosing when an artwork is digital or live, and as a pioneering queer collective, hybridity is in their blood and bones. Those two worlds will inevitably meet, and looking at Tyrell’s use of persona and digital photography, and the gaming-documentary mashup that is fafswagvogue.com, they already have met. But have you ever tried to rush a queen onto a stage? You best back off until she is ready.  

Another pre-pandemic example of a digital persona based art hack is feminist performance artist, Vriginia Frankovich’s Instagram story take off of the Great Kiwi Bake Off.¹⁵ This series of short-lived Insta stories played out over the weeks the reality baking program screened in Aotearoa. In it, the stay at home mother and artist set every Bake Off challenge for herself at home while raising a newborn. The DIY attack on who gets to compete, critiques the blurry personal lines of art and life, while poking fun at and finding joy in the intrusive game of putting your life online.  Casting herself as the hero of the everyday, mundane, repetitive existence of suburban family life, Frankovich triumphs over what a mother can and can’t achieve while breastfeeding.  Complete with the subtle framing of her husband doing all the domestic chores in the background, while she doggedly pursues her star baker dreams, this super addictive kiwi piece of digital content set the perfect scene for a world wide flurry of sourdough converts and lockdown cinnamon bun tutorials. 

It is Frankovich’s feminist sensibilties that led her to create her DIY toolbox of art hacks that side-step the need to rely on the arts industry to make it possible for her to be artist, mother, wife and feminist all at once.  She takes matters into her own hands, her family become her co-stars, her followers become her audience and she alone decides the fate of her grand finale.  Through a lifetime of struggling with and against the bind of being a feminist artist who is expected to put art before life, Frankovich has developed expert strategies to survive artistic life in lockdown.  She also created a meaningful hybrid of performance and digital art, well before the Zoom play was invented.

To simply replicate a performance on screen defeats the ability of live artists to create immediate connection through shared collective experience.  That is not to say that performance cannot be translated online, but that like Frankovich, we may need to carefully consider the frames we use, or like Tyrell and FAFSWAG, consider the multiple layers through which it can speak.  We may pause and ask if online is safe enough to hold the intellectual property of artists, especially artists caught in the everyday intersection of racism and sexism.

These artworks also happened organically, without and in resistance to the systems that dictate how art is made in Aotearoa.  No doubt, these kinds of examples continued through the lockdowns of 2020 and will continue into the future because artists who live in the intersections of oppressions will always hack a system to create their own. What happens though, when the system tries to appropriate those hacks to save itself? Through the pivot-gate of 2020, organisations encouraged digital pursuits so that their survival as businesses was safeguarded, but, as Tyrell and Frankovich have shown us, artists who live in the margins know how to survive already, digital strategy or not.
















If we are going continue the orchestration of a mass pivot on online, I would hope that it would be to intentionally create, as Rebecca Solnit writes, “new forms of resistance,”¹⁶ rather than a rinse-and-repeat of those systems that leave collectives of queer brown artists feeling unsafe; that leave a mother feeling divorced from the possibility of status, from being able to ‘have it all’.

On Friday 20th March, 2020, five days before entering into a lockdown, my stomach is churning through acidic anxiety as theatres across the globe throw content online and artists live stream their lives from their bedrooms. The pressure to devise a strategy is mounting for Basement Theatre, the little organisation adrift on Te Waihoritiu stream, to create a new life as a digital ship for artists to step aboard. The acid churning in my stomach makes my heart burn.

Every time I open social media, I am reminded of Laboria Cuboniks’ ‘The Xenofeminist Manifesto’ that “serious risks are built into these tools,” that they are prone to “imbalance, abuse and exploitation of the weak.”¹⁷  Is throwing live performance online (especially from artists of colour), in a bid to save a fragile and ephemeral artform, really the wisest option?

Granted, we need to be able to start somewhere, but is this digital void a safe space to fail amongst the swirl of ‘are the arts essential?’ debates? The fact that the question even needs to be asked is a signpost that the value of art (the importance of it) and the worth of art (the cost of it) are at odds with each other. Artists live in an inconsistent state: they are told they are valued, but not worth changing for.

To be clear, the instruction during a lockdown is to close all non-essential businesses. Art doesn’t close in a lockdown. Only the structures that sell it to the public close in a lockdown, and those are the structures that require scrutiny if they want to be essential to artists and to the public they serve.

Even at Basement Theatre, where things are fairly cheap, it’s still up to artists to find money and risk it in order to engage with the public. The organisation runs on a ‘risk share’ structure, a response to a need for artists to share risk with venues rather than carry it all themselves. It’s not the perfect solution to creating sustainable careers, but it is the best within the bunch of neoliberal options available here in Aotearoa. The building doesn't generate work, it is a shell that artists rent to fill with their wares.  Sometimes people buy those wares, sometimes they do not. Either way, shared risk or not, the artist pays to put their wares on show.

To put on a show (unpaid and excl. GST) at the Basement costs: 20% of your ticket sales; a technical falt fee $125  and $2.65 per ticket, sold at an average ticket price of $25.80. Say you sell 50% of your five night season (250 tickets out of a possible 500, without giving away any ‘complementaries’). You end up with $6450. Now, take away $662.50 in ticketing fees; the $125 flat technical fee; and $1290 20% venue hire fee and you end up with $4641.25.

Now, imagine you have just you and your operator to pay from this figure as  you have made, directed, performed, produced, and marketed the show yourself. Divided in half this now equals $2320.62. In Aotearoa, the average time spent to create a live show is four weeks, plus another week of performance.  $2320.62, over five weeks (assuming you work a 40 hour week), equals 200 hours.Your profit share, and that of your operator, ends up being $11.60 per hour - as long as you can write, direct, perform, produce and market the show well enough to get 250 people along without spending any money on anything else. Perhaps you did the show naked, with no set. Perhaps. It’s possible.

Now, imagine that you are in the midst of a global pandemic and that on top of this, you also need to convince your 250 strong audience not to watch ‘Tiger King’, but to tune into you, over Zoom, instead. Consider, as well, that the people inviting you to partake in this deal are paid a weekly wage well above $11.60 per hour. As a programmer my complicity in this consideration is palpable and uncomfortable; I cannot face simply moving this situation out of the physical and straight into digital.

Our world feeds off capital, capital feeds off competition and it’s no different online. The pressure to provide experiences online for free is even greater than in real life. Online is an economically unstable space, leading to tricky forms of paid and unpaid labour. Artists operate in a world where “we pay a projector more to be in the room than a live person.”¹⁸ With this devaluing of life so easily ignored when in the physical room, how can organisations expect that artists will be any safer in the snakey hands of capitalist algorithms?

What this encouraged digital pivot relies upon is a “pathological obsession with productivity, which often makes [us] incapable of seeing the forest through the trees”.¹⁹ This, surely, ought to be a red flag when the act of “making a thing hard to see is one of the ways in which power works.”²⁰

Capitalism thrives on a thirst for production, and if we are to believe its godmother Ayn Rand’s claim of being “the only system that stood for man's right to his own mind, to his work, to his life, to his happiness, to himself,”²¹ then it’s no wonder that we consider that if we are not producing, we then only have ourselves to blame if we wind up unemployed, mentally ill, and unhappy. For a community already subject to this internal burn of self blame, the reinforcement of it via global “tragedies − particularly ones which threaten to destabilise whole sectors”²² is more than enough to bear.

In the months after the 2020 lockdown, these internal rhythms were interrupted by a different kind of rush, one to ensure that artists received fair and equitable welfare. The New Zealand government made it possible for artists and independent contractors to apply for a subsidy of wages lost, based upon the estimated amount they would have made, to an average of $580 before tax per week. In an extraordinary act of kindness (or blindness?), Creative New Zealand deemed this amount unlivable  and topped it up with a further $420.  Interesting, considering the amount of work that arts structures in New Zealand actively encourage into taking place, based upon box office models that at a hopeful minimum leave an artist on $11.60 per hour.

From the fortunate position of being strongly led through an elimination strategy in Aotearoa, Rosabel Tan’s prophecy that, “as we emerge from the pandemic, the temptation will be to claw back to how things were before” is now underway. While other parts of the world are still in the dark realities of lockdowns, Aotearoa is getting on with the business of filling up venues up with box office based activities. Independent artists are split and replicate themselves further, trying not to forget to have a digital plan in their back pockets, just in case a Delta variant pops up. This pivot is largely self motivated and self funded, as performance artists try to catch up with those who have been playing the digital art game for decades.

I am not yet willing to predict, nor exercise power and control over, what this pandemic might mean for the future of live performance via the medium of the internet. The rules of this space seem far too dangerous, too wild west, for me. I watch as organisations and artists around the world try on this digital sweatshirt, one that seems a few sizes too big. It’s a struggle to make it fit, but I admire those that continue to pave the way for artists to continue their works as “architects of imagination, map-makers to the unknown.”²³

Rest
and
Refuse.

Reflecting back on that heavy rush in 2020 - was the long-term digital game plan to survive and burn brightly for a few weeks? Was it to seize the moment when physical access to live performance was cut off to the privileged, the moment that we finally figured out how to open the arts up to everyone?  What happened to those conversations about refusing to return to a system that was already broken? 

Live performance has been dealt a severe blow that it will need time to recover from. It relies upon the co-presence of living beings, and this fundamental contract has just had its force majeure clause triggered on a global scale.  

Lockdowns can have a guilty pleasure associated for those privileged enough to earn a weekly wage. They allow for slower rhythms of thinking, re-thinking, and changing. For artists, lockdowns can present an opportunity to refuse to play, to think about saying, “no”... as the work you have to do in order not to reproduce an inheritance”²⁴ of undervalued labour. It is a chance to swim against the rip tide and apply pressure back to wage earners, forcing them to reckon with their culpability in enabling dangerous systems.

Something happens when you slow down and refuse to keep up with those nagging neoliberal rhythms. You begin to look inward. And once the scene has been set for this, you begin to reimagine how you might use your skills to live better. You have no option left but to wrest away from those capitalist claims of your productivity being the measure of your happiness. Through rest and refusal, your worth and your value might have a chance to catch up to one another.

What I hope for is that organisations will use this time to turn the patterns of a neo-liberal art market upside down, recognising this as a time to pay close attention to opportunities for long-lasting change. What might happen if all the care and worth that was afforded artists in the abundance of Covid-19 recovery and adaptation funding continued on, as the base level of artist care and sustainability? 

What if time was taken to understand how the digital network distributes power and who benefits from that distribution? Afterall, the internet is physical. Made of copper and wire, hardware and labour; these physical elements operate upon land. In Aotearoa, they operate on stolen land and we have not yet found a way to repair the physical damage of this knowledge. How can we “change the shape of the network”²⁶ to behave differently? To acknowledge the innovative work that feminist, QTBIPOC artists have been creating in this space already? How can we use it to foster new kinds of intimacy, visibility, community, safety, to give land back? As the artist Fannie Sosa so clearly calls out: 

“Black folks and people of color are out making culture, like we always have been since times immemorial. But white supremacist patriarchal capitalism has upgraded itself and once again our cultural production is capitalised on, while our bodies, well-being and communities are still expendable. Consumerism from the other side of the barbed wired fence is extractivism. Extractivism - bottling the knowledge, without caring for the people, leaving holes in existence - is what white institutions are almost irredeemably built to perpetrate, unless they have a strong will, purposeful practice and vigilant understanding of redistribution, reparation and rest.” (Fannie Sosa, A White Institutions Guide to Welcoming Artists of Colour and Their Audiences)²⁵

Today, on August 17th, 2021, nearly eighteen months after entering into a lockdown, the doors to the Basement Theatre are wide open. We continue down a road of risk share and box-office, and watch as artists contend with the same battles they always have. While digital outputs remain on the table, we have not become a platform for pivoting artists. The rush to digital has subsided to a hum heard in the background. The conversations about equity, safety and sustainability, too, have reduced to a hum in the background.  COVID-19 hums at the borders. Algorithms keep a steady, attention-hungry pace. The refusal to return to a broken system is a failing one.

Then again, I have always been a fan of failure as an anti-capitalist strategy, and it shouldn't be an artist's job to fix capitalism. Certainly not for $11.60 an hour. The neo-liberal world is built to scare us into staying on the hamster wheel and into believing that it is our choice to do so. The most inflammatory action you can take is to stop and rest in a world that is built to rush you into the arms of something you don’t fully trust. 

My hope for artists is this: 

Do nothing.
Rest.
Be gentle.
Lean away.
Right away. 
Allow time to do its work.
Stare at the stars.
And if you have to do something.
Do it in the physical world.
In the place that you know. 
For the people that you love.
Do it for real.  
Turn it upside down. 
Just for you.
And no one else.