Pindices: Personal Political Indices

A project by sociologist Andrew Barry and artist Lucy Kimbell
–Website, gallery work and live research

Part of 'Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy', an interdisciplinary exhibition curated by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel at the Center for Art and Media (ZKM), Karlsruhe, Germany, March 20-August 7, 2005

How political have you been this week, based on acts you have performed? How much of a citizen? Pindices seeks to make individual political activity visible, but not in the ways typically measured by polling agencies or using the normal methods of social science. Rather than looking at political ideologies, institutions, groups or identities, in our project we start with the individual and their acts, and invite participants to make public a reckoning of their everyday political or citizenship activity by creating their own personal political indices during 'Making Things Public'. Somewhere between a public art project and bad social science, Pindices offers ways of thinking about what matters to individuals and how this is made visible.

Set up your own pindex at http://www.pindices.org from 20 March

http://makingthingspublic.zkm.de/

Andrew Barry is Reader in Sociology at Goldsmiths College, Director of the Centre for the Study of Invention and Social Process and the author of Political Machines: Governing a Technological Society. Lucy Kimbell is an artist and designer and AHRB research fellow at The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, University of Oxford. The project is supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Board, ZKM, Goldsmiths College and The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art.