Week Two- What Immaterial Labour Is

Ruth, David, Flore, Stephanie:
Today in class we continued to discuss what material labour was, and what forms of trade this could include. As a class we came up with some main branching topics like the trade of experience, emotions, skills, time, etc...

In our group discussion we started briefly brainstorming potential projects we could do around these trade systems:

-Basic yoga class
-Old clothes trade
-Art for conversation
-Study help/advice
-Fixing things... e.g.: patching clothes??
-Anonymous advice/confessions/discussions

What we found with these ideas was that most of them were only a one way trade, or after we discussed how we would actually do these, they seemed either unoriginal or unrealistic.




Ruth Johnson:
Discussing the trade of emotions and experiences reminded me of a collaborative art project I'd seen on social media recently, 'The Unsent Project' by (Instagram: Rorablue)
Explained in the images below, we felt that creating an interactive exhibit inspired by this could be quite successful. So our system of trade would be our 'customers' receiving the experience of participating, while we in return get their contribution in the form of art. For this we were thinking of perhaps doing something like: smashing plates/ spray paint/ group origami/ writing emotional notes based on prompts we could give- biggest regret/ lost love/ confessions/ memories etc?

Stephanie Howard:

An idea that we thought of that is a way of Immaterial Labours was balloon popping. By filling balloons up with paint and getting some darts this allows people to take their anger out on whatever is on their mind, the way it helps us it that we have the satisfaction of knowing that we have provided a non violent way for the people to do this. 



Flore:

A discussion we had as a team was finding a medium of an Immaterial Labour. For instance we had come up with concepts that would offer our services, include us giving in a manual job but we weren’t able to think of a concept that would benefit for us to get one back. As an entire group for the market, the markets theme is emotions in relation to colours. This market would allow the audience to walk through emotions that would allow them to either reflect of past times or capture feelings in the moment. As our group (group 32) we are most comfortable being a market stand as are part of the market in participation.