Making & Breaking probes modes of cultural production that engage with questions of social transformation. How can our current models for understanding art and cultural production be refashioned, and reconceived to live up to the claims of contributing to debates on social betterment?

The pattern followed by every artist is: first there is nothing, a conceptual vacuum, after which a work develops out of that nothingness. The entrepreneur works the other way around: first there is something, a product, and after it has been marketed all that remains is an abstract value, namely money, the dross of the earth, the nothingness into which every creative genius can plunge in order to let her unique abilities be paralysed.

Crapularity also describes collections of gallery and museum art that pile up in the spare rooms of the art system, i.e. the museum depots whose size continually grows in relation to exhibition space, and the tax-free airport storage facilities that private collectors use today. Withdrawal from public view is the necessary precondition for maintaining the fiction of scarcity upon which the conventional art market relies, without which its inflated prices could not be justified.

Memes operate at the low end of cultural production, they freely circulate with and as trends, proliferating with seemingly no defined formula. These relatively instantaneous media objects are swiftly copied, remixed and embedded into web pages, having become the de facto visual culture of the internet. The language of meme production, as any designer will tell you, has little to do with visual design but how ‘sticky’ the concept is, its ability to evoke an immediate response with viewers, intended or otherwise.

Can music change the world, or do we just want to believe it can? Although popular music has never by itself brought about social transformation, it has a long history of soundtracking and documenting aspects of social change and contributing to attempts to imagine and construct social, cultural and political alternatives.

Reflecting on Dakar’s hip-hop scene, Dulcie Abrahams Altass criticizes what she calls the Western art world’s “hip hop turn”, meaning the trendy incorporation of hip hop into shiny museum and gallery spaces thereby making a mockery of hip hop’s pronounced countercultural message.

There are blooming gardens in videogaming; moving cocktails of time, place, and sense that will shatter you in the best way–if you open yourself up to them.

People in the tech industry relentlessly talk about the ideas of autonomy, self-organization and autopoiesis. The problem, however, is these ideas related to self-governance are commonly taken at face value and used only formally. These ideas get appropriated as advertisements for technological development that often end up hypocritically reinforcing existing inequitable social and economic structures.

According to Reed, the current socio-economic stagnation (described in terms of capitalist realism) cannot be fundamentally overcome without reconstituting a different logical vision of the concept of being human, one that can overcome the ‘inductive stagnation’ of our moment…