This online prospectus contains information about the strategies and risks of Dark Velocity¹, a program that offers a response to ecological volatility from within the field of contemporary art. Its agenda is based on an expanded understanding of ecology that integrates all existing infrastructures into a single operational system without drawing a line between “man-made” and “natural” processes/materiality.

Dark Velocity¹ proposes that the proliferation of commodity forms offered by finance may serve as a productive model for providing resources required for addressing ecological volatility.

The concept of “ecological volatility” addresses the proliferation of the various ecological states caused by human impact on the environment. Meanwhile, measures that either neglect the state of affairs associated with the Anthropocene or aim at damage control for the short-term interests of privileged actors, may in fact be causing further positive feedback (e.g. by entrenching socio-economic inequality and contributing to the extinction of various species). Thus, ecological volatility is understood as a problem of planetary organization, requiring thinking and solutions that integrate all infrastructures into a single framework as opposed to seeking safety in pockets of presumed autonomy.

OBJECTIVE

Dark Velocity¹ pursues financial diversification from within contemporary art. The latter is structurally defined by its indeterminacy vis-à-vis ecology at large, sustained by the insistence on the proclaimed autonomy of (artistic) expression and (viewer) interpretation. Meanwhile, contemporary art’s strategies for engaging with ecological conditions are based on critique, disruption or exit, thus lacking in the systemic intervention necessitated by today’s condition of ecological volatility. Most crucially, contemporary art’s various claims to autonomy reaffirm the foundational tropes of today’s most dominant system of planetary organization – a form of governmentality that is dispersed through the individual, and which concentrates power by privatizing profits and socializing risks, thereby impeding the development of holistic strategies.

Dark Velocity¹ proposes that integrative thinking from within the field of contemporary art must start from taking material conditions as the very basis of praxis. The underlying logic of the strategy is to inflect the mechanics of capitalization by rewiring existing technologies. Dark Velocity¹ tests the viability of accelerating rather than resisting existing platforms through an unsentimental engagement with networked flows of power, value and desire.

PRINCIPLE STRATEGY

Dark Velocity¹ aggregates practices and strategies that aid in diversifying modes of engaging with art and capital, expanding the former’s functions and the latter’s pools of beneficiaries. Each new iteration capitalizes on the infrastructures of exhibition-making in pursuit of this objective.

Currently, contemporary art’s economy is tied to the tradable art object, while viewer experience is considered central to art’s social functionality in so far as art works and exhibitions are officially presented as necessarily addressing themselves to “a/the public.” The invariability of contemporary art’s commodity form makes object-ownership (whether individual, corporate or institutional) hold crucial leveraging power in the field, thereby overshadowing the potential of financial diversification.

This status quo reinforces a regressive subject-object divide, which stands in the way of an integrative ecological agenda. This in-turn severely limits the potential of capitalization and financial leveraging from within the field of contemporary art beyond capital accumulation for private ends and distribution of privilege within professional networks of art and exhibition-making. As a result, while exhibition-making serves as an important mechanism for market movements, the full spectrum of institutional and financial possibilities remains suppressed.

Historically, the art market lacked two necessary criteria for financial diversification: access to price information and a more expanded (and imaginative) understanding of commodity forms. The former was impeded in part by a lack of a single market and in part by a lack of regulatory mechanisms that would structure the industry. Today, the emergence of contemporary art as a global hegemonic system with an infrastructural network of circulation and distribution provides the necessary condition for making price information readily available and regulatory standards a rational goal.

Meanwhile, folk speculation — understood as investment into artworks with the intention of boosting private returns by capitalizing on the opacity of the contemporary art system — has limited the horizons of finance within the field of contemporary art. Consequently, the artwork may serve as a loan security for privatized ends but not as an underlying for a wide spectrum of derivative products. Dark Velocity¹ proposes that value-creation should not remain tied to the art object and its exchange, so that artworks and exhibitions could serve as underlying assets for derivatives and thus provide liquidity. Folk speculation is often confused with finance, in so far as both are future-oriented strategies for capacity building. However, while folk speculation is limited due to its exclusive interest in individualized future profit, finance, despite its bad reputation in socially-oriented circles, holds the potential for systemic interventions by expanding the readily available resources of the present moment.

The logic of finance provides a fertile ground for infrastructural arrangements constructed from within contemporary art that could procure liquidity for socially-organized structures necessitated by the condition of ecological volatility, thus exceeding the ad hoc interjections that characterize contemporary art today.

Dark Velocity¹’s short-term strategy is to bridge the gap between the status quo and the vision outlined above. In the long-term this would imply revising orthodox ownership models and reorienting the popular economic mind-set away from accumulation.

For now, the essence of Dark Velocity¹’s strategy is to divest the raison-d’être of exhibition-making from viewer experience, from sentimental and singular approaches to artistic/curatorial visions, and to recalibrate it by focusing on the occluded facets of cultural- and financial- capital-building that supports all exhibition-making.

Every new iteration of Dark Velocity¹ will move closer to achieving its objective by repurposing the exhibition-making format as a portfolio for leveraging ecological volatility.