Artist and activist Cassie Thornton presents THE HOLOGRAM, a mythoreal viral distribution system for non-expert healthcare, practiced from couches around the world. The premise is simple: three people – the ‘Triangle’ – meet on a regular basis, digitally or in person, to focus on the physical, mental and social health of a fourth – the ‘Hologram’. The Hologram, in turn, teaches these listeners how to give and also receive care. When they are ready, the Hologram will support them to each set up their own triangle, and so the system expands.
Writer and teacher Max Haiven presents WORKER AS FUTURIST, a project that has recruited 12 rank-and-file Amazon workers to write speculative fiction about “the world after Amazon.” In an age of platform capitalism and new forms of digital and robotic exploitation, workers at companies like Amazon are compelled to create an unchosen future that will exclude them. How can workers reclaim the power of future-making and how can this contribute to other movements that empower workers?
Cassie Thornton is an artist and activist who makes a “safe space” for the unknown, for disobedience and for unanticipated collectivity. She uses social practices including institutional critique, insurgent architecture, and “healing modalities” like hypnosis and yoga to find soft spots in the hard surfaces of capitalist life. Cassie has invented a grassroots alternative credit reporting service for the survivors of gentrification, has hypnotized hedge fund managers, has finger-painted with the grime found inside banks, has donated cursed paintings to profiteering bankers, and has taught feminist economics to yogis (and vice versa). Her book The Hologram: Feminist, Peer-to-Peer Health for a Post Pandemic Future is available from Pluto.
Max Haiven is a writer and teacher and Canada Research Chair in the Radical Imagination. His most recent books are Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire (2022), Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts (2020) and Art after Money, Money after Art: Creative Strategies Against Financialization (2018). Haiven is editor of VAGABONDS, a series of short, radical books from Pluto Press. He teaches at Lakehead University, where he co-directs the ReImagining Value Action Lab (RiVAL).
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Talks by Cassie Thornton i Maxa Haivena are a part of Ecological Technotope, a programme organised by Multimedia Institute, with the financial support of the Croatian Ministry of Culture and Media and the Zagreb’s City Office for Culture, Intercity and International Cooperation and Civil Society.
