The World Transformed

On the brink of the next industrial revolution of robotic technologies and artificial intelligence, the conditions of our professional and domestic labour will be subject to automation on an unprecedented scale. Manchester-based family art collective UNIT will assemble a group of child activists who, although frozen in time, will put forward a series of demands from the pragmatic to the utopian, reworking traditional protest slogans for a post-work future.
Also featuring: David Harvey / Ken Loach / Nina Power / Paul Mason / George Monbiot / Naomi Klein / David Graeber / Jeremy Corbyn / Russell Brand / Mark Thomas / Artists4Corbyn
The World Transformed, Brighton, 22-26 September 2017

Artists For Corbyn

Jeremy Corbyn emerged out of the 2017 UK General Election as a one-man catalyst for radical political change, galvanising a movement which had seemed unthinkable only weeks before. He was the subject of a smear campaign by the right-wing media which desperately attempted to link him falsely with Islamic and IRA terrorism. The mainstream left-wing media, threatened by his more radical socialist ideas, attempted to discredit him as weak and lacking in leadership skills. Even amongst the Labour Party many MPs attempted to topple him from within, completely ignoring the huge swell of support growing amongst party members. Inspired by grime musicians speaking out on Twitter in support of Corbyn, we worked with a group of artist friends from Liverpool to give a voice to artists and cultural workers wishing to show their support and defy the anti-Corbyn hegemony. In May/June 2017 Artists For Corbyn formed around an 'open letter' on change.org which asked supporters to add their name and share the letter. After a week online the letter had nearly 2500 supporters; all of these names were written up at an event outside Liverpool Museum on a 22sqm banner which then went on tour of a number of marginal seats in the North West of England and 'banner dropped' at a number of key campaigning locations. Photo by Mark Loudon. See #Artists4Corbyn

New responsive website

It's 2017, you most probably are no longer reading this on a desktop computer, in fact you're probably looking at it in bed. We hope that it is in some way coherent and not just a scramble of binary code. Yes, we've finally started to build our new HTML5 website which is responsive and should therefore look OK no matter what size your screen, please let us know if you're having any problems viewing it and which internet browser/device you are using so we can try to correct it. This is a work in progress that will continue throughout the year so please bear with us until the website is complete. We hope you like it.

Becoming UNIT

In 2013 and 2015 we collaborated in the development of Child One and Child Two. These are our most ambitious projects to-date and will involve an on-going series of social and cognitive experiments in to the realm of the unknown. To mark the departure in to this phase of experimentation we now work under the name UNIT, and will be working tirelessly to fulfil our neo-liberal duties as a hardworking family. We are particularly proud to be contributing 131,760 hours* of (surplus) labour-time to the UK's failing post-capitalist crises, post-Brexit job market through our own domestic reproduction.
*Estimate based on two lifetimes each consisting of 40 years of work averaging 1647 hours of work per year.

2017 / year of the robots

We have a few projects in the pipeline that we will be working on in 2017 that will consider our childrens' future in relation to the next wave of automation of the workplace, the Fourth Industrial Revolution of robotics and AI. This body of work will start in February 2017 with Driving to a Post-capitalist Future, a research and development project at Bradford University's Gallery II as part of their Art Lab programme.

Free University of Liverpool / Free Publication

The Free University of Liverpool was an initiative set up to protest the marketisation of education following the introduction of £9,000 a year tuition fees. It ran for three years during which a dedicated team of cultural activists, educationalists and cultural workers attempted to teach/learn/self-educate a BA in Cultural Praxis. A member of UNIT designed for free their book Foundations, to show support for the project and to try to help it to sustain and grow. In 2016, with no more printed copies left to distribute, we released an electronic copy available here as a PDF.

We engage in the adventure of knowledge not to assist the accumulation of capital but to collectively and individually realise our hopes and desires. Foundations is about a community in the making and the making of a new forum for living and learning.
From the Editorial of the book