“Works for Works” (2019-) is the successor project to “Lived Law” (2017-2019), which focused on the performative and existential rites of passage for works of artistic scholarship. As successor project, “Works for Works” deals with the internal metrics of works of artistic scholarship produced in opposition to forms of cultural patrimonialism and paternalism as found in both contemporary academia and the art world. The project effectively, in André Breton’s words, “goes over to the other side of the mirror” in pursuit of the untimely and timely principles of autonomous agency that support the tautological state given to so-called useless works of art and works of artistic scholarship. Key terms of engagement include: Moral Rights and Intellectual Property; Prior Art; "No Rights"; Useless Beauty; “History” and “No History”; Preposterous Presentism; and Vitalism and its “Other.”
Phase One of “Works for Works” (2019-2022), considered complete with the publication of Works for Works: Book 1, Useless Beauty (Punctum Books, 2022), is to be followed by Phase Two (2022-), which will develop a “no rights” idiom for works of artistic scholarship and an exit strategy from both proprietary regimes of intellectual property (IP) and careerist prerogatives. Intended to go beyond current open-access (OA) protocols for the editioning and dissemination of academic and artistic research, “Works for Works” will – through an analysis and deconstruction of IP law and forms of symbolic capital – introduce and elaborate an elective novel ecosystem for non-proprietary, collectivist-based works with no relation to capitalist hegemony.
The project includes development of Edition of One (EO1), a literary agency for collectivist-based works of literary-artistic scholarship.