Vol. 1, No. 4: Overlooked

Welcome to Soft Labor, the namesake publication of Soft Labor, a strategic consultancy for organizations, designers, and the culture industry led by Sarah Hromack-Chan. Soft Labor is a publication about creative labor—what it is, what it looks like, and how it has and will continue to change. Did someone forward you this publication? Subscribe or read our archives. 

Performance Improvement Plan

Performance Improvement Plan seeks to solve problems by answering questions about working in the creative industries. What’s vexing you? Talk to us: pip@softlabor.biz. All communications and sources will remain confidential and anonymous.

Dear Soft Labor,

I have been working as an administrator for a mid-sized cultural nonprofit for about a decade—long enough that I’m embedded into the fabric of the place. The organization holds a traditional separation between church and state, if you will, in that the administrators are largely positioned as operators in service to the visions of those who conceive of its public-facing programs. 

My problem: I have ideas that lean toward the programmatic side, but because of where and how I sit within the org, those ideas are mostly overlooked. I have strong street cred—colleagues listen to me and respect what I have to say—but ultimately the nature of my role prevents me from enacting my own ideas. What can I do to feel “seen” at work? 

From behind my desk,
Overlooked

Dear Overlooked,

One of the greatest farces often perpetrated in the arts is one of collectivity—that arts workers are producing culture for the masses while operating under a unified vision that places art above all. In reality, as with any job and really, the world in general, any number of individual agendas are at play. Some people’s names end up on the bill and some do not. Hard facts. 

Overlooked, we ask for your blind trust here for a moment, as what we’re about to say isn’t going to make instinctual sense to you at all: You are sitting in a position whose advantage you simply cannot see at this juncture of your life. It might not feel this way, but the people on the “back end” of a production hold a unique kind of power in that they collectively bring a lot of public visibility to others’ ideas. Programmers—curators, choreographers, directors, etc.—owe their careers to artists. They also rely heavily on folks like yourself, and the best ones out there know this. They know that it takes not just a village but an entire army to make what can sometimes seem like a shapeshifting fever dream become a real, tangible production. This is precisely why we’ve seen a massive, more recent shift in unionization efforts amongst arts workers.

We’ve also observed that folks who work in the culture industry tend to conflate their work-for-money with their so-called real lives. We challenge you to uncouple the two while maintaining pride in your work and your clear competence as a person who Gets Things Done. You might not be the main character between the hours of 9-to-5, but you can bring that energy into the rest of your life. Curate a show. Write a book review. Teach a night class or take one. These seeming side-hustles just might open up a new creative or even professional avenue for you. 

You might end up being the show pony after all. In fact, you likely are one already.

Yours,
Soft Labor 

Search Results 

“Search Results” points toward Soft Labor’s ongoing research interests.

🔗 Follow Soft Labor’s research channel on are.na. 

🔗 "How to Be a Culture Worker in Times Like These" is Laura Raicovich's battle cry for the present moment, just published in Art in America.

🔗 We're mildly obsessing over the design of Antikythera: Journal of Planetary Computation, a new journal (and think tank) out of the mind of Benjamin Bratton and co-published by the Berggruen Institute and MIT with design by Channel Studio. Any serious reader out there—and by "serious," we mean those who actively engage with foot and endnotes while reading—will appreciate Channel's design treatment of what one might characterize as "content rich" texts by various authors and designers. An accompanying book series published by MIT press were designed by Soft Labor comrade Practise. This one's for the academes and the theory heads.

🔗 Relentless autodidacts that we are, we partook in Nemesis Global’s (excellent) first workshop offering, Autonomous Strategy, back in the spring and are looking forward to spending our early summer engaging with its Autonomous Strategy Lab. A nice mental flex. As ardent lovers of the 90s who have cited Pine and Gilmore’s “Welcome to the Experience Economy” countless times over the years, we still adore Nemesis’s pandemic-era missive, “The Umami Theory of Value: Autopsy of the Experience Economy,” a long-ish form cultural analysis—as well as a fun, fast read that holds up five years later. Subscribe to the Nemesis Substack for ongoing notes as they've postulated a lot in the meantime.

🔗 We recently ordered a physical copy of Do Not Research's third anthology, which launched at Rhizome World. DNR started as a Discord server and functions as a collective platform for writing, visual art, internet culture research and beyond. We think they're exceptionally ahead of the game where politics are concerned.

Progress Report

“Progress Report” updates readers on Soft Labor’s own work, as well as that of our collaborators and comrades. For summer 2025, we’ll be mining the Soft Labor writing archives for pieces that hold relevance to our ongoing work. 

The Museum Interface is a meditation on museums and technology that Soft Labor principal Sarah Hromack-Chan co-authored with Rob Giampetro for Art in America back in 2014. Sarah was leading digital media efforts at the Whitney Museum of American Art at the time; Rob was leading a team at Google. Venture capital did stamp out a few of our digital references (Vine, anyone?) and yet interestingly, most of the history and many of the issues discussed in the piece—the mediation of art works and the experience of art-looking via social media platforms, for example—remain relevant in this present moment. Sarah also gave a talk about selfies in museums at a Whitney symposium that year called "Shared Spaces: Social Media and Museum Structures," the video documentation of which still haunts her (though do note that the silk dress she was wearing that evening was printed with magic mushrooms). A decade ago, many museums—remarkably!—retained policies against in-gallery photography, and her talk was ultimately concerned with what happens when a museum can suddenly "see" its audience digitally, through photography.

Dress Code

"Dress Code"spotlights workplace looks of all forms and kinds.