“Empathy Corporation” Exhibition
EFA Project Space
This event has ended.
The Hive features projects that expand the boundaries of art by seeking new ways to integrate into real life experience. Instead of producing objects for display, the artists featured focus on participation and reciprocity, engaging with the audience through interactions and services. They creatively connect with different audiences, and create projects that engage viewers in communication and participation.
Taking the form of a shared practice of consultants, these three separate projects lyrically explore team building, professional training, and workspace evaluation. The Hive’s EMPATHY CORPORATION workers individually and collectively attempt to counter situations of alienation and detachment brought on by institutional culture, reminding the audience-participants of the power of their own vulnerabilities and subjective insights.
The Feminist Economics Department presents “The Poets’ Security Force:” Poets’ Security force hires security guards in various capacities and encourages them to explore their own personal experience of security. Originally based in San Francisco, they have recently expanded their network to New York City. They have worked with security guards in art museums, educational institutions, and in public space. Through employment at the PSF, they offer guards space, time, and support towards developing methods of addressing the behavioral and psychological results of time spent in the security landscape. They are dedicated to re-forming the ideas and actions of ‘work’ and ‘security’ both on and off the job.
Robby Herbst presents “I and We: Collective Movement Workshop For Beginners:” What is Collective Identity? Sociologist Alberto Melucci suggests that in today’s alienated culture people find deep meaning and power through group identities that emerge through political social movements. With I and We, Collective Movement Workshop For Beginners individuals will explore their anxieties and their pleasures in becoming one with a group. Participants will do experimental “floor work” to encourage the sharing of ideas about what we can do together in society once trust between us is established. Workshops will include the use of “play apparatuses,” slides, ladders, and restrictive toys that teach about how groups move and function. This workshop is for anyone who has been curious about joining social movements but is uncomfortable with disappearing in a crowd. No special background is required, but a willingness to play with ideas and each other is.
Piero Passacantando presents “MyNerva: The Transmigration of the Cubicle:” MyNerva is a collaborative center for artistic research, dialogue and production exploring the office space. The cubicle, a form born as a dubiously visionary space in the sixties, now embodies everything alienating about office life. For The Hive, MyNerva invites office dwellers to enter into a conversation with healers, artists, designers and builders to discuss how this structure may transcend its present state and usage. MyNerva will host a series of activities and events, including an office yoga workshop, team building exercises, presentations by corporate employed artists, norm-bending office parties and more. The cubicle will be deconstructed, modified and improved upon during the span of the project through these activities, exploring possible futures of this dystopian structure. The transmigration of the cubicle is in our hands.
[Image: Robby Herbst “Pyramid of Capitalist System” (2011) Performance at LA City Hall during Occupation 10/11. Photo: Lisa Anne Auerbach]
Media
Schedule
from June 22, 2013 to July 21, 2013
Opening Reception on 2013-06-27 from 18:00 to 20:30