ABOUT
THE PUBLICATION
DISPASSION is the online publication of NOR RESEARCH STUDIO. The publication seeks to be a voice of dispassionate skepticism among the art and cultural workers who comprise its audience.
We publish essays, interviews, critiques, and opinion pieces on topics that range from shifts in the creative economies, the state of secondary education, labor justice, and studio management practices for working artists. Published intermittently throughout the month — usually about once a week — the newsletter also contains updates about programming like workshops and intensives as well as opportunities for working artists. Some popular reads include this sample grant application and Guaranteed Non-Opportunity series.
Originally conceived to help working artists understand how funding bodies review grants and to demystify how grants can be useful tools for structuring projects in need of funding, our editorial broadly seeks to illuminate the inequity that has long plagued the arts and suggests means of conducting arts-related business without depending on traditional philanthropy.
RESEARCH AND ECONOMIC MODEL
DISPASSION primarily exists to support, develop, and circulate research that makes sense of the creative economies for working artists.
To that end, we employ a unique model that weds our operations to our editorial output. Through our Working Group Z initiative (see below), our contributors are invited to participate in editorial and administrative decision-making and compensated through an experimental profit-sharing model. Periodically, we host open editorial meetings where our readers can share feedback about the work we publish, the state of our collaborations, and learn about our ongoing research.
We hope that by having open conversations about the theory and economy of participatory publications, we can encourage other artists to consider strategies related to the development of microeconomies, intellectual property, and self-employment.
SUBSCRIPTIONS
Our readership includes Turner Prize-winning visual artists, curators who are defining the role of technology in the arts, faculty at art institutions such as the School of the Art Institute in Chicago, ArtCenter, and the New School, and working artists from all over the globe.
Paying subscribers help support this newsletter. You can hit the subscribe button at the top of this page to become one of them. Currently, we offer two subscription tiers: BASIC ($5 per month), which grants readers access to our archive with the exception of our UNPUBLISHABLE column, which is exclusively provided to our SUPPORTER ($20 per month) subscribers.
WORKING GROUP Z
WORKING GROUP Z is a thesis about institutional infrastructure activated through an experimental labor initiative, dynamic profit-sharing model, and their complementary public programs.
The initiative seeks a documentable, reproducible business model that would sustain dynamic equity infrastructure — compensation paradigms that mix elements of equity and distributive justice — with specific focus on their implementation in arts organizations as an equitable remedy in lieu of partial ownership. To that end, the initiative explores working conditions among contemporary creative practitioners, seeking to resolve antagonisms between equity-driven and distributive justice-based compensation paradigms.
We hope this model could, for example, replace the nonprofit model currently embraced by countless art schools, museums, cultural organizations, and independent artists.
COHORT
AJANI BRANNUM is an artist and culture worker living in Los Angeles. Drawing heavily on the knowledges they inherit as a Black queer maker with Southern roots, their work investigates the choreographies of life in the shadow of empire, honoring and extending the ancestral wisdoms that animate their craft.
Brannum has shown work and performed at venues including REDCAT, ODC, Human Resources Los Angeles, Materials & Applications, Highways Performance Space, and Los Angeles Performance Practice. Born in Anchorage, Alaska, they hold an AB in English and a Certificate in Dance from Princeton University, and a PhD in Culture and Performance from UCLA. They are also an alum of the Cecilia Weston Spiritual Academy, helmed by Jade T. Perry.
ajanibrannum.com
ajanibrannum.substack.com
@aajjaannii
sarah bricke is a transdisciplinary artist, writer, curator, and researcher based in Southern California. Working through installation, objects, photographic processes, performative lecture, critical theory, and poetry, she is primarily concerned with the paradoxical relationships between seemingly disparate landscapes, bodies, and processes that are both distinct and inextricably linked as well as how those relationships are represented, perceived, and preserved through institutional and archival practices.
WYATT CODAY is intersex and autistic. She lives in Los Angeles, where she founded NOR RESEARCH STUDIO with Evan Kleekamp in 2017. She named herself its sole Research Director in 2023 and absorbed the DBA entity as one of her several aliases. Her work spans legal interventions, essays and contemporary folk tales, unorthodox disability accommodations, lecture-performances, and photography.
In 2020, Coday was named as a columnist-in-residence at Open Space, SFMOMA's online writing platform. In 2021, Coday received an emerging artist grant from the California Arts Council and published 4 INSTRUMENTS, an excerpt from her unpublished novella, with Apogee Graphics. Nightboat Books anthologized another excerpt in WE WANT IT ALL: AN ANTHOLOGY OF RADICAL TRANS POETICS (2021). Dirt published a third installment, RESEARCH, of the novella in 2023. Her writing has appeared in Into, The Avery Review, Open Space (SFMOMA), X-TRA, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, and her sculpture and photography were included in Red Wedding at Ruschman in Chicago. Her research interests include: disability, psychoanalysis, common law, transitive painting, the lecture-performance, and kitty cats.
NOR RESEARCH STUDIO is a design research studio that develops didactic media, exhibitions, publications, and other forms of intellectual property for artists, nonprofits, and creative businesses.
studio@nor.la
nor.la
@nor_research_studio
THANK YOU AND FEEDBACK
On a closing note, thanks to everyone who has subscribed. There is much to say about the decision to maintain a collaborative project or business — let alone a research-based, self-funded art practice — but your support is the most invigorating part. Please feel free to email us (studio@nor.la) or use this anonymous Google form if you have any questions or feedback.