[spectre] The Museum of Contemporary Commodities. A review by Joss Hands on Digicult.

[furtherfield]

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The Museum of Contemporary Commodities. A review by Joss Hands on Digicult.

The Museum of Contemporary Commodities – on exhibition at the Furtherfield
Gallery in Finsbury Park, London, is engaging the nature of our stuff – how
commodities enter and disappear.

A review by Joss Hands. MoCC is an art-social science project led by artist
Paula Crutchlow and cultural geographer Ian Cook in collaboration with
Furtherfield.

http://www.digicult.it/news/the-museum-of-contemporary-commodities/

The cyclical movements between commodity and waste has become an
accelerated cycle, one effect of which is the trash vortex, but another is
that the way we interact with, experience and make meaning from the
commodities we consume has also altered.  Buying a dress from Primark,
wearing it once and then disposing of it (with good conscience) in a
clothes bank (which incidentally then contributes to the destruction of
indigenous clothes manufacture in Africa) means a limited and fleeting
relationship with that dress – its value resides merely in its newness, the
novelty and immediate affective rush of purchase and unpacking.

The Museum of Contemporary Commodities – on exhibition at the Furtherfield
Gallery in Finsbury Park, London – is engaging the nature of our stuff –
how commodities enter and disappear from our lives – exploring these issues
with a novel take on the practice of curating. Rather than simply gathering
together objects and putting them in glass cabinets the idea is to
“Consider every shop, online store and warehouse full of stuff as if it
were a museum, and all the things in it as part of our collective future
heritage”.

MoCC is an art-social science project led by artist Paula Crutchlow (Blind
Ditch) and cultural geographer Ian Cook (University of Exeter) in
collaboration with Furtherfield as part of their larger project “Art, Data,
Money – Building a commons for arts in the network age”.
http://www.furtherfield.org/artdatamoney/

This is a form of curation as critical practice, in which an act of
reflection produces a perceptual shift in which we interact with the things
around us in a slightly different way that makes present the dynamics that
the current commodity system is always trying to hide.

Joss Hands is senior lecturer in media and cultural studies at Newcastle
University, he was previously reader in media and critical theory and
Director of ARCMedia (Anglia Research Centre in Media and Culture) at
Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge.

Joss’s recent research interests are in network politics and culture, a
field located at the intersection of technology, new media, politics and
critical theory. His focus has been in two main areas, firstly the use of
digital media for the expression of dissent and the organisation of
resistance movements, secondly the application of technology in more formal
democratic procedures, specifically the role of the Internet in
contributing towards the development of deliberative democracy. He has
published articles, review essays and reviews in journals such as
Philosophy and Social Criticism, First Monday, Information, Communication
and Society, Popular Communication, and Culture Theory and Critique. He is
author of a widely cited book on new media and activism titled ‘@ is for
Activism: Dissent, Resistance and Rebellion in a Digital Culture’,
published by Pluto Press in 2011 . He was principal investigator and
co-organiser on a two year AHRC funded project ‘Exploring New
Configurations of Network Politics’. Joss is currently series editor, with
Jodi Dean and Tim Jordan, of the Pluto Press book series ‘Digital
Barricades: Interventions in Digital Culture and Politics’.
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