For the Vilém Flusser Residency Programme for Artistic Research 2015, we are pleased to announce that jury members Kristoffer Gansing, Teresa Dillon and Daniel Irrgang have selected Valentina Karga and Pieterjan Grandry’s project Market for Immaterial Value.

Berlin-based, Karga and Grandry's work span the fields of architecture, public art, performance, print and graphic design. Their submission for the residency Market for Immaterial Value typifies their interests in sustainability, economics, the commons and resource management by presenting their personal financial situation within a public context. In doing so the couple not only expose some of the underlying dynamics from which today's algorithmically maintained, neo-liberal, capitalist systems emerge but also exploit its methods to create a new art object. This in turn produces options for discussing the effects such economic systems have on our day-to-day lives.

Presented as an online stock market, Market for Immaterial Value enables people to speculate, bid, buy and sell shares in an art object previously created by Karga and Grandry as part of their project Valentina and Pieterjan Invest in Themselves. This object – a gold coin – embossed with the head of Karga and Grandry represents how their domestic and interpersonal economic relations are built on upon layers of mutual trust, faith and intangible inputs. In revealing the dynamics of their independent and ad hoc financial reality, Karga and Grandry also are drawing attention to wider, societal values, which define what progress, success and survival mean in todays artistic and economic climate. Now Karga and Grandry want to sell their coin and allow you to invest in them.

The Vilém Flusser Residency Programme for Artistic Research 2015 will enable the artists to develop their online Market for Immaterial Value. In doing so supporting the continuation of Karga and Grandry’s critical and transdisciplinary exploration on the economic and resource structures, which influence the organisation of our contemporary lives.

The residency programme is a cooperation between the Vilém Flusser Archive at the Berlin University of Arts (UdK) and transmediale, festival for art and digital culture Berlin.