Critical reading of funding applications and evaluation reports in the arts.

Testing, evaluating, controlling, monitoring, indexing, measuring: we’ve inherited these terms from the mass economy era when scientific and industrial methods were applied to society & behaviour. The culture and philosophy of these institutions still live in today’s digital mindsets which, emboldened by ubiquitous data gathering, are driven to distill the world into algorithmic certainty. These systems have contributed to understanding human behaviour and unlocking more efficient production. But when they are applied to artistic production, they accentuate our expectation of visibility and control: our attempt to measure the unmeasurable.

Funding application and evaluation reports for cultural production are micro reflections of the values and politics underlaying the systems producing them. They are the public system’s struggle to justify the role of art and art’s struggle to remain autonomous. In this event we will look at examples of funding applications from different contexts and periods and discuss them not under the time pressure of a deadline of for the purpose of producing a project but as literary materials from which we can reflect on political discourse, artistic production today and the values which are being expressed in these forms.

More info & registration to follow soon!

This event is collaboratively organized by Elena Veljanovska, Ela Kagel, Yael Sherill and Jorge Vega-Matos.