Michael Mandiberg: Home Work
A VIRTUAL PROJECT EXPLORING THE THEME OF LABOR IN THE PRACTICE OF MICHAEL MANDIBERG
Curator's Statement
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- Jane Doe
Quantified Self Portrait (One Year Performance) (2016–2017)
Quantified Self Portrait (One Year Performance) uses the self-tracking technology of the Quantified Self movement, a trend in the wellness industry that aspires to self-knowledge through tracking one’s personal data. I programmed my computer and iPhone to capture screenshots and images every fifteen minutes for one year—a technique used to monitor freelance labor—and tracked my mental, physical, and emotional states with a Fitbit and journal. Quantified Self Portrait (One Year Performance) is a three-channel HD video that documents this process. Instead of pursuing wellness and perfection, Quantified Self Portrait (One Year Performance) reveals my position as a microcosm of a pathologically overworked and increasingly quantified society.
FDIC Insured (2008–16)
FDIC Insured (2008–16) is a large-scale installation that memorializes the abstractions and utopian promises of global capitalism, which can never be fully understood or achieved under the frenetic flow of big data and deregulated markets. FDIC Insured is a collection of 527 castoff investment self-help books with the logos of failed banks burned onto their surfaces. The work combines the failed utopian promises of the discarded self-help books with the newly-vacated corporate logos, branding the collapsed futures promised by the physical objects with the visual identities of economic failure.
Artistic Motivations
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In Conversation
On DATE PRG spoke with Mandiberg about this series of work.
The Artist at Work
Inspirations
In 1970s and 1980s New York, Tehching Hsieh made a series of artworks: five separate one-year-long performances. The video above provides an overview of One Year Performance 1980-1981 (Time Clock Piece).
For one year, the artist punched a worker’s time clock located in his studio, on the hour, every hour. Marking the occasion by taking a self-portrait on a single frame of 16mm film, the resulting reel documents a year in his life at approximately one second per day––a pace that is polar opposite of the enduring length of the original performance. The punch cards, witnessed by a third party for authenticity, and other ephemera, document Hsieh’s life restructured around this highly repetitive task.
About the Artist
Michael Mandiberg (b. 1977, Detroit) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work manifests the poetics and politics of the information age. Mandiberg works within systems to make visible processes that are often hidden in plain sight, or on public web servers. While technically sophisticated, their projects exceed novelty to make propositions about how our lives are being shaped by these tools, and the ideologies undergirding them. This non-binary approach crosses media and evades stable categorization: from large-scale installations like Print Wikipedia’s 7,473 books, to custom software driven durational performance like Quantified Self Portrait, to socially engaged pedagogy like the New York Arts Practicum. They co-founded Art+Feminism, an international collaboration that takes place at The Museum of Modern Art, and hundreds of venues around the world.
Mandiberg received an MFA from California Institute of the Arts and a BA from Brown University. Their projects have been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, New Museum, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Arizona State University Museum and Library, Denny Dimin Gallery, Eyebeam, and Transmediale, amongst others, and are in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Stedelijk Museum and 21c Museum. Their work has been written about widely, including in Artforum, Art in America, ARTnews, the New York Times, the New Yorker, and the Wall Street Journal.
Mandiberg is the recipient of a LACMA Art+Technology Lab grant, three Eyebeam fellowships, a Mellon fellowship at the CUNY Graduate Center, several Wikimedia Foundation grants, and commissions from Rhizome,and Turbulence. Mandiberg has participated in residencies at Fonderie Darling, the Banff Centre, Eyebeam, the MacDowell Colony, and 18th Street Arts Center.
Mandiberg is Professor of Media Culture at the College of Staten Island/CUNY and Doctoral Faculty at the CUNY Graduate Center. Mandiberg’s work lives at Mandiberg.com.
