Creative Reset is a research program about art workers’ organizing and economic sustainability in the arts in times of permacrisis, supported by the INC and Caradt. It explicitly confronts a set of uncomfortable but unavoidable questions. How can artists make a living without selling their souls? What is the role of art in a world wrought by innumerable crises? Can we work towards a just and sustainable art economy? How would this change the circulation of art, the curriculum of art and design academies, the exhibition programs of museums, and the organization of collectives and unions? The concrete focus of the research is a curious but critical examination of six models: fair practice, artist cooperatives, unions, universal basic income, infrastructural critique, and philanthropy.
Our Creative Reset was launched in the fall of 2021 with the Post-Precarity Autumn Camp – a collaboration with Platform BK and Hotel Maria Kapel. Since then, it has developed into include a wide range of research activities, from events and conference contributions, to lectures, essays, book reviews, zines, a manifesto, and the podcast Art in Permacrisis. You can find an overview of these activities on the blog. The results of Creative Reset will be shared with the broader public in the forthcoming book Art Beyond Precarity, to be published with HumDrumPress (Rotterdam & Berlin) in 2025.
Previous INC Research
‘What are we to make of someone who says they love their work and cannot imagine doing anything they enjoy more, yet earn so little that they can never take a holiday, let alone afford insurance or a pension? How are we to think about a person who is passionate about the creative work they do up to 80 hours per week yet feel fearful that they will not be able to have the children they long for because of the time and money pressures they face?’
These questions were written by Rosalind Gill and published by the Institute of Network Cultures in Technobohemians or the New Cybertariat? (2009). During the Covid pandemic in 2020, it became painfully clear that not much had changed. Facing the newly heightened urgency of artistic precarity, we decided to start Creative Reset: the next step in our research on working conditions in art and (digital) culture. This legacy goes back to 2005 when we organized the conference A Decade of Web-Design and was further developed in the MyCreativity research program, which included two conferences in 2006 and 2014 and the publication of the MyCreativity Reader (2007). When the INC made its first-ever episode of the podcast ‘Zero Infinite’ in 2017, it was about Pausing Precarity. Creative Reset also builds on ongoing the research of MoneyLab, a network of artists, activists, and geeks experimenting with forms of financial democratization in the digital economy.
Graphic Design
The visual identity of Creative Reset is designed by Wieke Willemsen (https://www.instagram.com/wiekewillemsen/).
Typefaces: Ortica & Ortica Bold by Benedetta Bovani (Collletttivo, 2019)
Research Partners
Creative Reset is a research program of the Institute of Network Cultures (Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences) and Caradt (St. Joost Academy of Art & Design). Sepp Eckenhaussen is the lead researcher.
Organizations that have participated in the research activities of Our Creative Reset include:
Hotel Maria Kapel, Platform BK, the Learning Community Critical Making, Casco Art Institute, ARIAS, PLOKTA, University of Groningen.
We have received generous support from the Centre of Expertise for Creative Innovation (CoECI).
