March 2013

Hey friends!

A lot of spectres continue to join us at morning coffee, here at troublemakers central, after the ‘Spectres of Evaluation’ forum. It was a challenging two day event, run by the VCA’s Centre for Cultural Partnerships, with about 40 participants from across CACD, including artists, arts funders, scholars and researchers. Thanks to everyone to making this happen!

As usual, we have more questions than answers [see also our paper from Dec 2012 below]:

What are we, as gatekeepers and trend makers not hearing, not seeing?
Who was not in the room?

What is the value of evaluation – especially for us as artists?
Where do we place ourselves in the spectacle of evaluation?
Be wary of any activity that demands objective truth, and detracts from subjective sharing – even gifts come within a context of power…

Who is evaluating the evaluators?
Do we have or need a CACD Ombudsperson, in light of funders increasingly wanting to act as producers?

Who defines the terms of engagement for evaluation across the arts sectors? And why?
And how can we make this process of defining ‘evaluation’ an equitable negotiation, [the act of definition is a dance of language, the linguistics of power].
How will the terms of engagement have provable benefits for all parties, in a way that we all can share, if the participants and artists are the subjects?

With all the tools we discussed at the forum, from negative value, politics of aesthetics, to networked thinking and dialogical approaches, how do we reach a re-connection between artists, participants, audience, funders and researchers, that doesn’t feed into oppressive tactics?
And how to speak to (our) privilege and the power relationship within the structures of cultural production?
Making art is about taking risks, making commodities is about the economy. Why do we assume we can evaluate the risks others take and control the purse so they can or cannot do it again? They will do it anyway, so what’s in it for us, what are we scared of?

If we evaluate community art in a society promoting social band-aids, not social revolution, then our lens most likely will value compliance not liberation.

Lots of talk about network analysis, but where is the debate on social exclusion, oppressive tolerance and the potential for social control through mapping and trapping?
What happens between the nodes of the connected social networks? Historically the majority of the world’s population doesn’t trend well.
Will more data and better algorithms provide us with better means to make ‘better art’ and be more effective – at what?
We struggled to hear a shared horizon being discussed. And beyond the horizons, what are our dreams, our visions?

How is your liberation bound up with mine? How can we generate hope AND income? How do we disconnect from ‘story theft’ and colonization, built into the very fabric of our social network interfaces and data harvest machinery?
How is evaluation different from unilateral data harvesting?
What can evaluators do for the evaluated, formerly know as the artist?
How can we determine practical solidarity, in an agile, flexible way, so that evaluation can feed into our work and build trust, rather then fear-driven compliance?

Amongst the sensation that we are a fractured sub-group of creatives within the Virtual Class, was the desire for shared language.
Business language keeps seeping into arts and culture debates. We squirm at our use of ‘equity’, but find it useful as a litmus test for power relationships, as money and symbolic exchange flows through all of our interactions.
What language can we create that can support us as cognitive workers to make sense of the new paradigm shift prompted by digital technologies, globalization and the re-emergence of nationalism in the wake of brutalised and fractalized societies?

And are we being too precious, too fragile, too invested in self-preservation? May be we should not care who steals stories and who owns the data and reads its patterns?
But what about communities who are vulnerable? Do we care? Where is this care coming from?
In a fully realized global network of Big Data, are narratives still important or do we enter the age of participation over story?
How do we speak to power struggles in our work, when we are muzzled by risk adversity?

Where do we build critical literacy into the submission, work and evaluation cycles?
We all evaluate constantly and critically reflect on our projects, but where do we share these mostly internal processes, so that the sector could gain strength and artists take part in the power of influence?
Or do we need to?
Would it be more competitive not to share? Or even increase the risks of funding getting slashed?
Or does a deeper, radical sharing of our process in terms of negative value take the ‘magic’ away?
Or could it benefit the parties involved and even the wider sector?
How can artists be transparent about process AND be able to divert and recombine resources when they see it necessary, when funding agreements demand control and compliance through pseudo-objective evaluation according to nebulous guidelines?

Our two key responses to the underlying fear and frustration we felt amongst our peers are practical solidarity and self-determination.
How do we link our work to self-determination, without succumbing to identity politics driven by fear and belonging within a culture of lack?

Perhaps we should send all the funds directly to the communities and let them go through the same trial and error we do, as ‘experts, artists, evaluators, facilitators, curators, arts managers, etc’ – that’s a lot of play money, a bag of autonomy and as many successes as the current model provides.
How do we proceed towards ‘agile trans-formative evaluation’ that could build trust through mutual risk taking and equitable process of negotiation?
What about ‘glorious failures’ as a category?

Below are a few interesting links on some of the (contentious) issues around Networked Thinking / social network theories, that struck us as one of the most vibrant and difficult debates at the forum.
We are entering the next stage of our negative value project and will have an update soon.
Please send us ideas, reading material and other stuff that makes for interesting discussion on ‘harm’ and negative indicators. And chocolate, please.

With love, Jen and Carl

The tyranny of nodes: Towards a critique of social network theories

The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete

Big data, language and the death of the theorist (Wired UK)

PLOS ONE: Global Civil Unrest: Contagion, Self-Organization, and Prediction

The media utopia of the avant-garde. Franco Berardi

The Warrior, the Merchant and the Sage

Futurism and the reversal of the future