Caroline Woolard: Information, Visibility, Collaboration and Labor as Empowerment.

            Caroline Woolard’s practice is one that is engaged with active social modeling, manifest through shared information. The focus of this modeling is activated within labor-based economies. For example, her sculpture “Barricade into Bed” is a sculpture, which she made herself, but is also activated through the open sourcing of her sculpture’s plans. Anyone is offered the opportunity to collaborate with her by altering her plans and sharing those through an open source. In her talk, she emphasizes that her work seeks to avoid discrete objects. “Barricade to Bed” embodies this principle in its open sourcing. Open sourcing can be considered part of the work’s material, one that is time based, ongoing and unpredictable. Through open sourcing all alterations of this sculpture exist as shared information, generating an alternative material and social archive. Her work is not activated through the object itself, but through its connection to other people. Woolard does not assume the role of final authority on her work. She assumes her sculpture as a proposal rather than an end in itself, a means for conversation, experience and shared labor. As a model, this work offers the possibility of a kind of micro economy that revolves around a product, and includes the product’s users as contributors, equal and empowered authorities.

            Visualization of social relationships plays a crucial role in her economic models. In “Barricade to Bed” this visualization occurs though her plans, connections are made and seen through visiting and revisiting her sculpture, its subsequent alterations, and alterations of those alterations. However, other models she proposes and enacts are visualized with the info graphic. In her work with Feral labor, an artist who refuses to travel, instead opting to be paid with a travel-fee equivalent and sending her work through artists whose itineraries intersect with its final destination. The path of travel, in her talk, is visualized through an info graphic, showing an erratic, indirect travel route. “Seeing” plays a role in her work with “Milk not Jails” as well. She does not, in this case, provide a graphic visualization. Her involvement with this organization is rooted in a desire to “see” or acknowledge subtle economic relationships (that between the prison system and dairy farms).

            Woolard's work is manifest as alternative propositions to established economies. Her interest is in what she calls “solidarity economies”. The processes and forms of these economies, which potentially include all participants, seek to empower and engage, rather than separate and obscure. In choosing “Milk not Jails” as a contributor, she consciously chose a group of people who are enacting an alternative to an established, visible economic relationship; empowering farmers and the formerly incarcerated. Feral labor operates outside of an established economic model as well, giving the artist and her contacts active decision-making power and capital through alternative process. “Bed and Barricade” operates in opposition to the passive experience of purchasing a product that someone else has made and has final authority over. It does this through the sharing of information and works to activate her question, “If experience is a criterion of knowledge, then who will I become while making art and learning about labor?”