MyCreativity Sweatshop

MyCreativity Sweatshop

20 November–21 November 2014

Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, Netherlands | Website

MyCreativity Sweatshop, Institute of Network Cultures

In 2005, just after the creative industries policy had taken off in the Netherlands, the Institute of Network Cultures gave a critical impulse to the debate with projects such as A Decade of Webdesign and MyCreativity. At the time, discussions centered on questions such as work spaces, precarity, free labor and the (im)possibility of quantifying creativity. A decade later, the ‘creative industries’ have become an established economic sector, a situation that has radically reshaped the conditions of creative labor. Simultaneously, new technological trends turn creative processes increasingly into a question of big data streams, algorithms and digital scalability.

This situation raises a plethora of questions for the creative producer that the MyCreativity projects aim to address. In what way are the conditions of creative production changing? Can we see an improvement of the conditions of creative production or has the insistence on unifying the creative sector multiplied the problems and challenges for creative labor and entrepreneurship? Are there new openings and possibilities that have emerged on the ground as reaction to the creative industries approach? What are the new physical, technological and aesthetic spaces of subversion? Are there new practices in the fields of art, design and entrepreneurship that could form the basis of an effective critique of the official discourse? Is it still possible at all to highjack the creative mainstream for the purpose of real disruption?