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post-RADMIN reflections

The ember of thinking behind [[https://cubecinema.com/pages/radmin|RADMIN]] was not so much a curatorial project as throwing up a tracer or perhaps lighting a bonfire. A wild sign to illuminate what is out there, &/or who/what would be drawn to the prospect of a festival of Administration. The topic of administration represents only a sub-category of a larger enquiry around how we might do business differently. But by nature being urgent, common, everyday (yet curiously segregated when it comes to creative practice), enveloping of both individual and collective situations (while going often unspoken / unacknowledged in each), socially awkward and determinedly anti-spectacular, it seemed like a good place to start. 

RADMIN was devised and delivered over a run-up of 4 months by a core team of two, alongside many others from our larger collectives the long-standing [[http://cubecinema.com/about|Cube Microplex]] and the recently formed Feral Business Network. The process embodied a rapid-fire materialisation of some decades of thinking. For me it was a space to lay out a tangle of burning questions, such as,

  * What can artists do for business?
  * Why leave the experiments with business to Silicon Valley?
  * How and where to collide the wealth of indigenous thinking from art with the intractable problems of business as usual? 
	
and in the longer term,
  * How to speak back into the spaces of business and enterprise with new business shapes for a genuinely sustainable economy?

To put these ambitions in perspective, RADMIN could be viewed as an initialising public event at the the start of a 20-year project whose objectives include,

  * To break down some of the consolidating associations of business and open up this territory to exploration;
  * To reconsider the 'dull' spaces of administration as not just something we are subject to but a site for politics, solidarity and change;
  * In relation to art, to extend a critical and experimental attention from content to containers (the infrastructure in which the art work takes place);
  * To assemble diverse experiments with business in this realm and hash out a vocabulary for naming them together. (Could these practices already constitute an economy?)
  * At the same time, to provoke, dislodge or at least carefully consider the litany of scarcity in sustaining artist livelihoods - and consider how the above work might better resource us.
  * And most likely as contentious, to invite thinking about business and economy at the psychological level into domains where it is not normally welcomed or trusted, bringing political autonomy, psychology, spectacle and modes of organisation into probable collision.

RADMIN was also and specifically a festival in, of and about the Cube Cinema, crucible of much of this thinking. The Cube is programmed, staffed and governed by approximately 150 volunteers and is many different things to each. A founding intention for RADMIN was to open out the infrastructure, processes and organisation of the Cube, as programme content. In a sense, an internal operating memo in the form of a festival.

A more practical trigger was the Feral Business Research Network (FBRN) an unrealised academic networking project, that despite being unselected for funding, played out across two workshop gatherings in [[http://companydrinks.info/event/feral-business-research-network|London]] and [[http://laforesta.net/feral-business-research-network|Rovereto, Italy]] in 2018. RADMIN was to be the third and final network-building event in this series.
 
Production/formatting

The festival format loosely followed a rapid fire or Russian roulette setup wherein a volley of short events would act as diverse triggers for thinking, each event lasting not much over an hour, after which participants could be pinballed in another direction, and with enough surrounding space for striking up conversations. A scattershot approach, opening on the first evening with a [[https://cubecinema.com/programme/event/radmin-gala-dinner-the-shares-a-meal-hosted-by-the-viriconium-palace,10229|Gala Dinner]] in a mansion, with 3.5 minute dinner speeches to cast the terrain of what might be considered the subject matter of administration wide (in the business school, trade and logistics, monetary experiments, hitchhiking, heritage, plumbing and radical art history). 

Day Two was designed as a more [[https://cubecinema.com/programme/event/radmin-convention,10584|conventional series of workshops]], followed by an [[https://cubecinema.com/programme/event/radmin-office-party,10585/|office party]] at the Cube; with Day Three opening out into delegate-generated content with the [[https://cubecinema.com/programme/event/radmin-professional-development-bonanza,10586|Professional Development Bonanza], radio show, raffle and Trade Show at the Cube, and [[https://cubecinema.com/programme/event/radmin-100-ushers-feature-film-tbc,10587/|staff training session]] before closing with the reassuringly familiar format of a feature film.

Participation

The programme aimed to work both as both a dragnet and a filter: to invite in a broad constituency of interests, and gauge where the concentrations and intensities might lie - and what topics could be fruitfully discarded. In the end, the event primarily self-marketed along ley lines of association as rapid word of mouth ticket sales kept attendance almost entirely within existing networks. This made for a strange constraint, combining the contiguous with the far flung, as attendee tickets were booked by close colleagues and distant friends of friends from Malta, Serbia, Belgium, Switzerland, Hong Kong, Hull and Glasgow. The fear of being wedding-like was in our minds. However these networks themselves I would be cautious to describe as homogeneous or coherent - even bringing an art crowd together with Cube staff/audiences made for an unwieldy and surprising collage.

The call for participation was to bring your own business, which was successful in attracting small delegations, but allowed a minority to register under their own names as self-employed business entities. All delegates were asked to submit an organisational bio, which together made up the printed programme. 

Reflections

Organisation through a RADMIN lens. 

The container of RADMIN had the fun side of rendering many of the usual stumbling blocks and dull administrative grooves as info-rich sites of special interest, even if as a performance to only ourselves. This included getting caught in each others' spam filters, the online ticket-seller software hardcoding Valentine's Day into the event description, and our out of business hours email habits tripping a host of out of office autoresponses.  

The Money 

While not an overt focus, money surfaced with persistence in the programme as an organising technology. Of which to observe,

I
The budget is the content. 
The budget was both an organising input and a featured programme output of the event, printed and distributed as an A3 poster. In accordance with the economy of the Cube, the event was run entirely on ticket sales and substantial personal/organisational resources. This budget decision was central to the event design. 

II
As a whole, the festival performed a demonstration of a wealth of resources which ran counter to a litany of scarcity that surged through many of the conversations. These were quite literal: a feast, various repositories of cash, a mansion, the richness of innumerable projects and lives' works. I would also observe that life rather than money loomed over the event as the scarce resource. A number of largely health-related shocks meant a swathe of last minute cancellations as delegates were felled by illness, family and a sobering shadow of bereavements. Conversely, two vivid days of sunshine set the scene well beyond our ability to stage-manage. 

III
The Viriconium Palace money experiment, which opened the event, inflected procedings more than expected. Reactions a pervasive line of discord through the event. I would assess part of the distrubance was in response to the event design, Not speaking on behalf of RADMIN or issuing explanation of reassuring commentary. Instinct to radical decentring and a certain politics of organising - equally could read as opacity. 

IV
The Business Experiment Raffle
The other money game, the raffle, was surprisingly uncontentious. Announced at the gala dinner, a raffle with one ticket available to each delegation, a £2,500 prize, gated by requirement to be present at the draw and deliver a proposal for a business experiment. The format of pitch offset with the ambiguity of no reporting/accounting conditions for the winner, and a random draw. Snakes and ladders but without snakes. A pleasure in the freedom of pitching without assessment. The raffle entries collected here. 

Logistics

Working across two venues served to extend the concept of the Cube, its operations, administration and self-image, well beyond the building. It also stretched our organising capacity and human energies to the limits. The Cube has an inhouse tradition of extreme attention to detail, the raffle ticket design alone probably took number of weeks. As a determinedly all-volunteer workforce, this work was woven into and around other labours (painting and decorating, lecturing, telephone sales, archiving, public speaking, parenting and not ironically admin roles). Cube ushers took days off well-paid jobs elsewhere to work back-to-back shifts, involving a lot of cleaning. 
 
Questions of how to be handbuilt and powerful were vividly rendered in the sub-project of the printed RADMIN reader, a zine-like collection of short texts and  a DIY endeavour by design. Graphics students from the University were happy to contribute design and layout as part of their professional practice module. However when it came to print, fold and staple, not passing the 70-unit job over to University Print Services (a design decision, not budget-driven) caused an operating logjam played out in the art department printer queue, where I spent almost two entire days negotiating with (supportive) IT support technicians, network log-in protocols, office supply enclaves, line-management protocols, institutional hierarchies, beneficial staplers and the whole situated process of production which was really the entire point. 
 
Delegations

Large-print lanyards made organisational entities vivid to each other across a crowded room. Attending as organisational entities had the effect that afterwards people were referring to each other as TOFU or PlumbMaid, rather than catching names. The programme was the treasure.

What was learnt

From the hindsight of the day-after debrief breakfast the following points came into focus.

A general sense that some felt fed with a vast array of inspiring inputs while for others that the programme was nowhere near hard, deep or business enough, crystallising a desire for deeper work to follow. 

Converging desires, how to still speak to the street, bring in business, not alienate those already 20 years in to the the process and still keep the peripheries open. 

And a challenge to be less white. 

How to engage (or not) with lines of conversation that circled back to 'privilege', 'struggle', ' exploitation', 'clique', body, money and politics.

How the psychological/ spiritual level for many tripped up politics. Irritation with the body level - what does that tell us? 

The omission to emphasise to all (not just to speakers and workshop hosts) that the programme constituted actual research, not content delivery for an audience. So the process is contributory and where it doesn't work is the engaging space for learning. 

Next steps

Primary that the workshops were too short, the frameworks were just being played with.

This calls for a switch from a network/spectacle phase to deeper workgroups, day long investigation 

The valuable interdisciplinarity here is in bringing these enquiries into the same hosting space / the same page / into physical/social relationship with each other by hosting the interfaces between them. Time and other resources for breaking down frameworks.

a) Legal (teresa's crew + other radical lawyers)
b) Administrative (angela/CUPS. university and institutional administrators)
c) Vegetal organisation (ingrid / foAM)
d) Pscyhological level (peer coaching training / network)
e) Representational angle (ellen's enterprise imaging, could be explored much further as a group)
f) Creative accounting (not present at RADMIN, but critical. need to find someone to lad it)
g) Physicalising admin (intimacy encryption / heath, administrative postures / guy. translating administrative thinking into other realms)
h) Artist and tradesperson (Sovay/ Plumbmaid)
i) perhaps closely related with h), the role of artist/practitioner in all this. how to i) be resourced and ii) have agency. bringing together scarcity and abundance. the incidental person may or may not be a role model - despite clumsy IU workshop there is still something super interesting there. Practitioners and interdisciplinarity.

 Actions

An immediate task to organise around, the post-RADMIN reader

Assemble the raffle pitches

An annual retreat

An annual counter-capital raffle 

keeping open at the edges. the more surface area in the edges, the more can go on.

Something compelling to articulate in the inversion between handing personhood to a river - a better than nothing anthropomorphising - and the reverse, that a stone can be a business doesn't comercialise a stone, but stonifies commerce. Work for Ibex.