Jobless Webzine

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Critical Overview: Sparkly DIY Critique

“Jobless” is a webzine created by Daria Ivans and hosted on the minimalist web-publishing platforms Hotglue and Neocities. Main themes of the webzine are artistic labour, precarity, and the impossible task of making art “employable”. The project is using digital cartography of subcultural media artefacts as a medium for the institutional critique. It reflects on the invisible proposal labour demanded by international residencies. Navigating “dream jobs” in art or adjacent fields are fraught with instability, self-doubt and the pressure to constantly network, self-promote, submit proposals for open calls and grant programs.

Ivans create xenomedia art that mimics cozy web aesthetic and (re)mixes a constellation of interactive media: a forest of useless jobs, an art-job-search diary, a career quiz, a dress-up game “dress up for the job you want”, an art market page, and a “realm of dream jobs” consisting of an auraphotographer, a carpet glitch generator, a VR ghost hunter, a curator of internet rabbit holes, and a screenshot archivist. 

There is also “mockup” CV of a very special researcher which can and should be taken seriously as Daria makes key points about structural inequality in this seemingly unserious manner. 

Another “participatory interface” of the webzine is artist proposal puzzle “solving” which you can emerge in art-curatorial discourse: pool of the edgy theoretical buzzwords and syntax that make you dizzy. Its Russian-language twin page plays with the buzzwords that became common in art institutions in Russia since the Russian – Ukrainian war — a language of political escapism, forbidden subjects, and hypocritical transitions toward “localities” and minor cultures. 

These are not aspirational career guides, but artifacts that document, lament, and resist the realities of affective and emotional labor. The “dream” can be recast as a potential site of exploitation or, alternatively, as a reclaimed space for redefining value and fulfillment outside capitalist paradigms.

Each icon on the virtual map represents an aspect of the struggles and dreams of a young artist today. The project is thoughtfully, if imperfectly, engages with a DIY subculture realm. It operates simultaneously as an ironic institutional critique, a functional archive, a curatorial statement, and a participatory platform. 

Webzine by Daria Ivans.
Text by philosopher & meme researcher Arina Atik.
Production by Eva Brown.

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