Minor Compositions Podcast Episode 20 The Arts of Logistics with Michael Shane Boyle & Elaine W Ho
This episode is a conversation around the new book The Arts of Logistics: Artistic Production in Supply Chain Capitalism by Michael Shane Boyle. For this conversation we are joined by Elaine Ho, who artistic practice explores similar areas. Through this conversation explore how artistic practices intersect with the global logistics systems that underpin contemporary capitalism. Today the dynamics of logistical capitalism both shape dynamics of artistic and cultural production as well as arguably are shaped by their being intertwined those very forms of artistic production. How might forms of art produced in the logistical mode offer us a space for viewing infrastructure otherwise?
“We live in a world where nothing is untouched by supply chains—art included. In this major contribution to the study of contemporary culture and supply chains, Michael Shane Boyle has assembled a global inventory of aesthetics since the 1950s that reveals logistics to be a pervasive means of artistic production. The Arts of Logistics provides a new map of supply chain capitalism, scrutinizing how artists retool technologies designed for circulating commodities. What emerges is a magisterial account of the logistics revolution that foregrounds the role played by art in the long downturn of global capitalism.”
For more on the book.
Bio: Michael Shane Boyle is Senior Lecturer in the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary University of London.
Elaine W. Ho works between the realms of art, social practice and language — and since 2015, also a co-conspirator of Display Distribute, a thematic inquiry, distribution service, now and again exhibition space, and sometimes shop founded in Kowloon, Hong Kong. Seeping via the capricious circulation patterns of low-end globalization into other subaltern networks and grammars, Display Distribute’s recent activities include the experimental infrastructure LIGHT LOGISTICS, poetic research and archival unit Shanzhai Lyric, and a peripatetic radio programme of hidden feminist narratives known as Widow Radio Ching.
Intro / outro music: Bow Gamelan Ensemble – Massed Percussion (1988)
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