Valuation Chambers

= initiative originally from the Arts Assembly

Description

Ivor Stodolsky:

"The Arts Assembly (TheAA) was highly active a few years ago, and you can find extensive documentation on its site: www.TheArtsAssembly.org. Variations have included full-fledged Constituent Assemblies, a week-long implementation of Valuation Chambers to "value" the work of the artists of 8th Manifesta Biennial in Murcia and a wide variety of tailor-made workshops. The latter have ranged from student workshops at the Beaux Arts to mock-exams for curatorial students, to evaluating the work of the Aalto Camp for Social Innovation (ACSI). We continue to use its Chambers/formats in different contexts.

The "Valuation Chamber" is the most highly elaborated of the Chambers. It is an intensive if very straight-forward p2p procedure for determining the values/criteria of a given "work" (any given idea/proposal, but initially, an artwork or curatorial project). Using quite simple determinations it becomes in practice a quite sophisticated tool.

In fact, it might be an interesting p2p procedure to implement on a site like Loomio, to supplement the usual voting procedure.

We are pleased that The AA's practices have been taken up by independent groups under the CC licence: a group in Ekaterinburg is independently using the "Street Arts Assembly" format on a yearly basis. We are currently interested in new contexts in which to re-deploy and develop it." (email, July 2015)