Future Art Base is an autonomous unit which focuses on radical experimentation and innovation. The idea is to use and experiment with the power of art to create unforseen, unknown or unthinkable (economic, political, social, organizational etc.) processes. We study and develop the bases of such an art, art of imagining and creating a new social future, art of reopening the field of possible. The production and development of the tools and raw materials needed in the building of the bases of future art – the ideas, concepts, words, affects, methods, inventions, approaches, networks, relations… – takes place in our experiments. Future Art Base Experiments are like immaterial factories, production lines, to create new combinations of people, economy, art, politics, philosophy, technology, organization, partial components of subjectivities... The relationship between art and economy, or art and politics, cannot be about content: art expressing views of social resistance or art making things more sellable is not relevant. We think that the common ground of art and politics and art and economy is in the collapse of old forms of life and in the creation of new forms, this is where they meet. Future Art Base Experiments  are a method to bring and hold together many essential but heterogeneous elements. They create new forms, new combinations, paradoxes, monsters that don’t seem to fit the boundaries of normal life, the easy flow of things and action.

Robin Hood Minor Asset Management - Investment Cooperative of the Precariat  was established in June 2012 based on a detailed analysis and understanding of the imitative nature of the financial market and to challenge the big banks and their elite asset management business. Robin Hood is a contra-investment bank of the precariat. Our business is minor asset management. 

Financialization of economy is a fact which has its origin in the crisis and risks of the industrial form of commodity production and economy. Yet the number of banks in the world has reduced in the last 30 year by 40%. Or that today only 10 big investment banks control over 90% of the entire derivative market whose size is estimated to be around USD 1200-1400 million billions (20-23 x the entire world Gross National Product). During the first 3 months of 2012 alone, the profit of Goldman Sachs was over 2,1 billion dollars, HSBC 6,8 billion dollars (of which investment banking 3,1 billion dollars), JP Morgan 5,4 billion dollars etc. And we know about the scams, interest rate manipulations, unbelievable bonus systems. Even their own employees and directors accuse them of manipulating and exploiting clients for making profit. This is the context of Robin Hood.

Robin Hood is a project where we try to think how could we bend the financialization of capital into the advantage of precarious workers? Could we think of how to transform private profits into shared resources? Could we think of appropriating the means of production financial capital has in its use, and of sharing them, of putting them into work for us? Could we think of a relation to money, not necessarily as tied to capitalism as a historical form of production, but as a means of freedom, escape, and increase of independence? Could we think of profanation finance, of returning its space to common use and play?

And we think we can. Robin Hood is a contra-investment bank: it is a cooperatively owned tactical investment agent for the precarious workers, which addresses the asymmetrical division between those who are able to create money by transforming it into financial capital (to earn money as separate income without work) and those whose only access to money is to work (possibly at any cost) – or first take debt, and then work. Robin Hood is developed as a strategic means to challenge this debt mechanism of control and the limited options the precariat has for financing its living (debt, work and destructive competition of it, wishful thinking, marginal communities “outside” exhange, revolution and taking over government, hoping that the state will take care of you...). Robin Hood offers precarious workers a possibility of income which is not tied to the necessity to work. It is a very concrete reopening of the field of possible.

n-1 Publications.  ”n-1” is a concept of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari which refers to a necessity to create new organizational ideas and forms – to which “one” (leader, value, idea, principle) belongs only as subtracted. This is exactly the nature of our series published by n-1 Edições: we don’t organize to make the series, we make the series to organize. To organize at n-1. Just as the publications of the series fold as results of cooperation between brains they also unfold into events – theatrical montages, installations, exhibitions, master classes, dinners between friends… – that go beyond the book-form and reverberate the theoretical and sensitive questions found in each of them. In the series we want to produce more-than-books, object-books which talk you your senses, which you want to touch and which reach beyond the basic media of book. More-than-book triggers multiplicity, n-1, whereby any element aspiring to a position of centrality is subtracted. 

In the series published and coming out next: Félix Guattari: Kafkamachine/Maquinakafka (2011), Heinrich von Kleist: On Marionette Theater (2011), Kuniichi Uno: Genesis of an Unknown Body (2012), David Lapoujade: Powers of Time (2013), Peter Pál Pelbart: Cartography of Exhaustion (2013), Akseli Virtanen: Critique of Biopolitical Economy/Crítica à economia biopolítica (2013), Suely Rolnik: Anthropophagic Unconscious: Between art, politics and clinic (2013), Bracha Ettinger: Co-Poiesis (2014), Franco Berardi: Manifesto for Future Art Base (2014), Jean Claude Polack: Experiências da locura/Experiences of Madness (2014), Maurizio Lazzarato: Sign, Machines, Subjectivities (2014) Jean Oury: Criação e esquizofrenia/Critique and schizophrenia (2014), Eduardo Viveiros de Castro & Alexandre Nodari: From the primitive matriarchy to the society against the state and beyond. Cartography of the anthropophagus descent (2014), Sakari Hänninen: Five lectures on economic theology (2015), Alejandra Riera: Maquettes-without-quality (2015).

Mollecular organization studies the functioning of semiocapitalism and develops soft technologies of cooperation, tools for building the impossible communities of abstract work and its performers. Molle is a laboratory of schizoanalysis. We operate in the soft stomach, “il ventre molle“, of arbitrary power. Or more precisely: we are the soft belly of arbitrary power. Mollecular organization is a group of loosers, sad figures, dark souls, cynical opportunists and depressed princesses. We are not tough or macho, we are soft and wet, impotent and feeble. We don’t march or demonstrate. We have difficulties in getting up from the bed.  We are molle people, the future of cooperation.

Kafkamachine – a film project studying our life at the mercy of financial economy, crisis of Europe and transformation of politics, based on the project plan by Félix Guattari. Guattari thought that Kafka was nothing less than the future. For him Kafka was not a 19th century writer prisoned in dark family relations and guilt, loneliness, submission to the law, anguish of modern man, but a writer of future in whom all this blows up and strange problems and openings which are only today starting to talk to us begin to emerge. Following Guattari’s project plan, with Kafka we try (1) to map and study our fears, hopes, problems, dreams and existential territories at the mercy of financial economy and arbitrary power; with Kafka we try (2) to develop tools for an “impossible community”, a cooperation not yet there, a cooperation to come. This is the Kafkamachine we want to assemble. The shooting started in December 2012.

Aesthetic Dispositive of Semiocapitalism - research group at Academie Schloss Solitude