︎︎︎MATEUS GUZZO

“Me mandei de São Paulo depois da crise da água e depressão econômica só quando já não dava mais pé. Acabei me instalando numa das cidades mais boçais do estado. Campinas é uma mistura de orgia oligárquica com patifaria institucional. O provincialismo dessa cidade me incomodava, mas eu não me via com opção. Preferia ficar ali do que voltar pra babilônia do terceiro mundo. Em São Paulo, não tinha essa. Era matar ou morrer. Aqui era tudo um bando de pau mole suburbano". 

How do ritual events such as Burning Man and Maker Faires transform collective experiences of creative workers, negative and positive, into experiences and cultural products that fuel digital economies? We intend to explore this question by focusing on the cultural infrastructures of creative labour—a productive force outputting social, symbolic and informational capital. Understood as immaterial and affective, labour in the digital economy complicates the separation between work and leisure. This transformation is observable in physical and virtual space. It marks a codependence between the shifts in the nature and organization of paid and unpaid labour, and redesigns economies from mechanical repetitive production to knowledge and information-based. Creative labour assumes dynamics of play, as users latch onto idealized spaces of fruition and consensuality that instead create new enclosures and avenues for productivity.
        This project converges on the social and political consequences of creative labor in the case of Maker Faires and Burning Man—infrastructures that create opportunities for enterprise and entrepreneurs. Situating these phenomena within history, this project contributes to the intellectual trajectories of graduate students and faculty across disciplinary and methodological areas of expertise.