MAGICAL SPACE PRINCESS

Are you a recent arts and humanities grad who excelled academically but can’t seem to get hired, or an undergrad who doesn’t know what will happen to them afterwards, or someone realizing that the job they did land kind of makes them feel terrible? Do you often get MPDG’d in your professional and personal life, but have trouble with discipline, longevity, and maintaining a practice? Do you repost memes about being paid thousands of dollars to eat fruit and make your friends happy?

In this workshop, I, as a creative strategist and multimedia artist (in ways I kind of made up myself), will present my portfolio to show you how I got *somewhere* with my branding, connections, and gigs over the course of six years in London. I will also critically engage with what it means to be in a culture that has commodified “being yourself” through a reading of Sianne Ngai’s concept of the zany and my own experiences with platform misuse. The workshop will prompt you to consider: If you didn’t need money, what would you be doing anyways? What kinds of interfaces, outputs, PR, and collaborations happen to bring you joy? Most importantly, how do you vouch for yourself on your own terms, even if you need to do shitty work?

This is probably the closest I’ll ever go to “self help” but I’m not presenting this as an expert on business, art, or PR. I’m presenting this, basically, to show off the quality I have that has both made my life amazing and alienated me over and over: the fact that no matter what, I cannot help but publically do, say, and express how and what I please. My mentality has always been: if they don’t want me acting as how I would anyways, and what I’d gain from LARPing isn’t fun, then I don’t want it.

I firmly believe that we have always been mediated as artists by the expectations of the public and of the market, even before late stage capitalism. Learned helplessness is not a choice in my opinion. Being mediated should be fun, and maybe even erotic. So yeah, come hang out.