Modern & Im/material Things

triciawang:

The Project for the Study of Corporate Personhood

I am so excited for Kenyatta Cheese’s The Project for the Study of Corporate Personhood. He’s doing a performance art piece that questions the legal standing that corporations can be treated as persons. And he’s taking it pretty far to reveal the absurdities of modern corporate jurisprudence.

Kenyatta is going to set up a corporation. He is going to sell his identity to a corporation for 3 months and the corporation will take over Kenyatta’s identity online and offline. The corporation will subsume all responsibilities for overseeing the Kenyatta Cheese brand during the 3 months. This means all uses of the name “Kenyatta Cheese” will be under the corporation’s control.

When the corporation buys the name “kenyatta cheese,” the corporation will treat it as if it bought any other product or company. So press releases, marketing, and publicity will all be part of the process.

So what are some the things that this corporation will do with the identity of Kenyatta Cheese?

create a manual on how to be kenyatta cheese

hire people off of Criagslist to be Kenyatta Cheese at public events (they will use the manual for guidance)

ask friends of Kenyatta Cheese like Baratunde, Kevin Slavin, and others to be Kenyatta Cheese at social gatherings (conferences, parties, dinner events)

hold online events where people can interact with the hired kenyatta cheeses

It really makes us think about what it means to turn a person into a product. I imagine that anyone who works at a marketing company would have a lot to learn from this. And just as a design research project, it’s super fascinating to ask how we design for users when the user is a corporation. How can Kenyatta Cheese turn himself into a replicable product?

I love art projects with critical teeth! I also love his pictograms of his project, though I believe his hair should be twice the size.

I personally am excited to see pictures of Kenaytta’s friend in an afro wig - I guess this is what it takes to get Kevin Slavin, Elspeth Roundtree, Jamie Wilkinson, and Nora Abousteit into an afro wig!

kenyatta:

The Project for the Study of Corporate Personhood

This is my project proposal for a 2012-13 Rhizome artist commission. I’m going to sell my name to a corporation for three months. They will take over all of my public interactions both online and irl. Kenyatta will become a product. I will not exist.

corporatepersonhood:

The Project for Corporate Personhood (aka Kenyatta Co) is a three month performance that explores the topics of “corporate personhood” and personal identity.

The American Supreme Court and some politicians have declared that corporations should be treated as persons. So what happens when a person voluntary assigns their personhood to a corporation? Can it be used to raise awareness of the issue of corporate personhood and create spectacle in the process?

Kenyatta Cheese (creator of Know Your Meme, an artist, an activist, and a person) will sell the exclusive use of his name to a corporation for a period of three months. That corporation will assume both the real world and online identity of ‘Kenyatta Cheese’, reimagining his personhood as a brand with the help of ethnographers, lawyers, focus groups, public relations departments, a creative agency, and friends and acquaintances. During this period, Kenyatta (the person) will not be able to use his name except in the case of emergencies and air travel.

In order to develop Kenyatta Cheese (the product), the corporation will conduct research and development, mining his personal life, online profiles, and browser data for uniquely identifying information. The corporation will hire his friends and family to “be” Kenyatta Cheese at public events, speaking engagements (technology and media conferences), and social gatherings, interacting with people based on their own ideas of how they think Kenyatta Cheese would behave.

These public interactions will be documented through hidden video and interviews will be conducted to capture the thoughts and feelings of the Kenyatta Cheese “betas”. People who interact with these betas will be given a business card directing them to complete a customer service survey online.

This documentation will serve as the basis of standard operating procedures for being Kenyatta Cheese, brand guidelines, and a marketing and media buying plan. The corporation will then hire social media “gurus” to take over and run all instances of Kenyatta Cheese online including Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and a personal website. Strangers will be hired off of Craigslist to represent the brand at public events in cities around the world (complete with afro wig and business cards). Like the research beforehand, the interactions of these Craigslist hires will be documented and they will be interviewed.

The three month project will culminate in the compilation of a dozen or so interview videos, the creation of the corporate and product documents, the capture of company interactions in social media, and hopefully two public panels: one at SXSW (or similar conference) exploring the topic of personal identity and marketing featuring 4-5 “Kenyattas” and a second panel at the New Museum exploring the topic of identity through the stories of several Kenyatta’s, artists working on similar issues, and representatives from each of the companies involved in creating Kenyatta Co.

Possible Kenyattas will include but not be limited to author Baratunde Thurston, technologist Anil Dash, artist Kevin Slavin, writers Nick Bilton and Clive Thompson, entrepreneurs Nora Abousteit, Know Your Meme co-creators Jamie Wilkinson and Elspeth Rountree, performers Mike Rugnetta and Patrick Davison, actress Michelle Krusiec, sociologist Tricia Wang, and Kenyatta’s mom.

I’ll be interested in seeing how this turns out. I’ll save some thoughts for a more in-depth post, but one thing that does immediately come to mind is the relationship of brands to social “influencers” (i.e., people within peer networks that are identified as influential in given category among their peers). In particular, I’m thinking about instances where influencers are asked to write or create content on behalf of a brand. Disclaimers aside (e.g., FTC regulations around sponsored social media posts), is there a kind of pseudo-corporate/corporatized personhood that is created in that exchange? In marketing, we talk a lot of authenticity and authentic relationships between consumers and brands. So when people in the industry reach out to influencers to connect them with a demo or a new product, there’s the hope that they’ll be so smitten with the new product that they’ll want to tell everyone they know about it. Sometimes that happens. But there’s also the reality of people who game the system and basically act as brand schillers on their blogs, so much so that their online personas are basically an extended mouthpiece for whatever brand reaches out to them. Where do they fit in a model of corporate (or branded) personhood? What larger questions about unpaid (digital) labor are raised by this exchange? More later.

Source corporatepersonhood