Start up, Burn out:
Life Hacks

13.12.2018
Het Nieuwe Instituut

A shady corporation is trying to take control of a fluid, chaotic global market. Workers surrender themselves to a seductive new device called Iris, which purports to enlighten them and unleash the real power of the entrepreneurial self. Iris is designed to help full-time, part-time and zero-time employees cope with the complexity of modern life, divulging secrets of the precarious worker, of autonomy and maximum efficiency through a new magic formula contained in the meaning of Life Hacks. But… anonymous cyber-pirates are exploiting the device to rouse a cry of rebellion against this oppressive society of self-management. Discover the paradox buried deep within Iris, where autonomy leads to subjugation, and subjugation appears as freedom.

The Experimental Publishing (XPUB) program of the Piet Zwart Institute invites you to the third event of the Life Hacks series. Following the launch of ‘Ten Theses on Life Hacks’, XPUB’s 7th Special Issue is a further step of an inquiry into the meaning of Life Hacks. XPUB welcomes you to experience a personal session with Iris, and discover your limitless potential to succeed.

Life Hacks is part of Het Nieuwe Instituut’s fellowship program around the theme of burn-out. As 2017 fellow Ramon Amaro states, “on the one hand, to ‘burn out’ is to stall, break, or become otherwise unusable. In other words, processes, procedure and participation simply stop working. On the other hand, burn-out is an opportunity to break open, promote action and catalyse change towards new structures and relations.”

Life Hacks manifests in a series of gatherings that respond to this ambivalence by exploring the approaches and techniques adopted to design or redesign life against the backdrop of growing precarity and an intensified entrepreneurial regime. Together with Silvio Lorusso, theorists, practitioners and XPUB, the Experimental Publishing program of the Piet Zwart Institute, Life Hacks looks into the tensions and releases that emerge from the constant reinvention and progressive self-optimization necessary to inhabit public and private space, manage time and productivity, and tweak one's own thoughts and feelings.

Contributors

Gill Baldwin, Simon Browne, Tancredi Di Giovanni, Paloma García, Rita Graça, Artemis Gryllaki, Pedro Sá Couto, Biyi Wen, Bohye Woo, Silvio Lorusso, Aymeric Mansoux, André Castro, Steve Rushton, Michael Murtaugh, Leslie Robbins. Produced and published by the Experimental Publishing (XPUB) program of the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam, December 2018. A collaboration between Silvio Lorusso, the Research Department of Het Nieuwe Instituut and XPUB.