The MoneyProject intent

I started this project in 2008 while in art school.
For a while I had been very struck by the sense that money pretty much totally consumes our lives, before we do anything in life we first have to make money and then give it up in order to facilitate social action. Whether that is buying free time to relax with friends or family, or buying books to read radical theory, or if we want to participate in the culture; in order to supply your "needs" you must first either sell your labour in the market or succumb to some form of institutionalization. On the most profound level every relationship and every action is determined and affected by money. Our reliance on money subtends, infiltrates, and I would say undermines all our actions trapping us in a web of psychology and complex sets of social relationships, in a contradiction between our need for money and our desire for sociality. At the same time talking personally about money seems like a taboo. I felt there was a disconnect between what we think and what we actually do day in day out….work make money, spend money, work….etc.


I was thinking and feeling that art, as a world, a form of communication and in its concerns and content, was very removed from the most pressing philosophic, ethical and social issues of our time and place. I also wasn't finding a lot of material written about our experience with capitalism outside of who got too much money and who isn't getting enough, which is a discussion with limits. I started the MoneyProject as both a reaction to cultural and intellectual institutions that may be too embroiled in their own capitalist hierarchies to be able to examine capitalism straight on, and to the art world where unique objects are produced by individuals for sale, and where individual careers are sought that are in the form of a star system. I was looking to develop a project that was engaged in current pressing issues, which I see as rooted in capitalism, and also tapped into a socially open creativity and knowledge on the ground.

For me The MoneyProject takes on the openness, free association, and transgressive potential of art language, and brings it together with what I feel is the most pressing social issue of our time, and attempts to develop a mode of working that facilitates conversations among people in non-commercial, and non-ideological intimate settings. Our objective is to get away from careerist commercial spaces and into a social discursive space. Our aim is to find unique screening opportunities such as home screening situations and outdoor screenings. This is to open up the possibility of the videos working to stimulate intimate discussions within communities rather than joining the spectacular parade of festivals and cultural production that reinforces culture as something you pay for and consume.

The MoneyProject hopes to both produce a unique knowledge form and a socially creative exploration.


To explain a bit about the process: I approached people that I knew and who I felt were particularly questioning individuals to work with to make personal videos. over ten videos were made by our first screening. These videos stand on their own, but also work together as whole program to flesh out a multi-dimensional discussion as well as contrasts in esthetic approaches.

Through the first set of videos that were produced and shown a new group of people came on board the project to make videos and so the project is now growing organically. While I initially started the project and in many ways informally direct it, the group process is open and egalitarian, and individuals determine their own relationship to the project. Now we envision the project as a kind of creative, contestational archive of peoples voices, a knowledge base to be expanded and used…

With that in mind individuals within the MoneyProject also have autonomy over their works and can screen them independently of the MoneyProject as they wish.

The MoneyProject's relationship to money is marked by the same contradictions we all face. So far we pay individually when we need to for stuff according to our subjective relationships to money. We screen for free in all occasions. Any money that is gathered goes back into the project.

The MoneyProject exists in a context of globalized capitalism.

One issue that we deal with when we use media technology as we do in the MoneyProject, computers and camera's mainly, is the nature of that technology as a product of sites of exploited labour. The camera is not simply a tool to be used however we wish, but a device that has resulted from historically western valorization of the abstract sciences, the obsession with the eye, vision and the image, bringing with it objectives of social repression through making visible, through surveillance and the fixing of truth as an empirical entity. The camera is a machinic invention, as such it is produced in socially repressive factory environments by humans in relation to other machines. Media technology is made available to us here in the west as "affordable" because of the low rate of wages and militarized production environments in Asia. Recent suicides at the Foxconn factory in China seem to indicate the unliveability of life in conditions of long work hours, low wages, boring repetitive work that doesn't contribute to personal expression or growth, abusive and punitive management and alienated living conditions in a factory/city. Our access to the camera is because of a double standard between our "freedom" to express here and the simultaneous negation of that very same "freedom" elsewhere.

We don't need to make excuses or romanticize our relationship to technology. The MoneyProject does not replace the greater importance of social relationships, making video is something we can do together to look from the safe distance that technology provides on our powerlessness to really share in each others lives on a broad social level.

In order to address this issue we can donate to China Labor Watch as a counter relation to just mindlessly consuming media technology. While this is a very distanced action, it is an effort towards a material connection to a part of our reality that tends to remain beyond our focus.

While these so-called world leaders make decisions on our behalf at this summit, and we protest their actions and the outcomes of their policies, we are also caught in a bind of reproducing capitalism in our daily lives. One of the levels of our struggle is to create an open and complex understanding about how this is happening and what the impacts of capitalism are on our relationships to each other. The MoneyProject tries to address this level of sociality, of sharing our creative expressions about money so that we can learn to upset capitalisms intervention into every aspect of our lives.