Cultural Capital

‘Cultural Capital’ is a distributed artwork that draws parallels between the use of bacteria and culture in traditional breadmaking and the generative condition of some network art. Within digital art, ‘generative’ art enacts the relation between global algorithms that effect local data streams to produce aural-visual displays. ‘Cultural Capital’ appropriates the dynamic between those elements - global parameters in local operation producing irregular stimuli - and sites it in a non-digital context. ‘Cultural Capital’ is a touring artwork that accumulates bacteria and cultural capital from every venue visited and curated in gallery and non-gallery settings. Following mutually-agreed protocols, the curators grow sour-dough to share with guests at formal or informal events which form part of the curation. As part of the work, curators document the process of caring for the sour-dough as well as the event itself.

The work builds on efforts to devise a model of distributed art as proposed in ‘Art and Curating as Distributed Form’; ‘Cultural Capital’ directly informed later iterations of ‘Art and Curating’. The project follows ‘Love Potion’ (2005) and ‘November’ (2006) in supporting protocol as an art medium, investigating local events as enactments of protocol and experimentally documenting such ephemera.