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Feral Trade: a talk by Bristol-based artist Kate Rich

Kate Rich
April 1, 2009 7PM

Feral Trade
A Talk by Kate Rich

April 1st, 7pm
Western Front Grande Luxe Hall

Kate Rich has run the Feral Trade grocery business, trading goods along social networks, since 2003. Feral Trade forges new, “wild” trade routes between art, business and social interaction. Goods hitchhike on other sources of movement, harnessing the surplus freight potential of social and cultural travel to haul grocery items intercity, often using other artists and curators as mules. Central to the process is the Feral Trade Courier Database, which coordinates the movements (or stasis) of products and couriers, and prints out waybills, detailing cash transactions, transit anecdotes and social contacts specific to each consignment. This rich data enables the globally travelling food item to conduct a broader array of information than typically relayed by products on the market.

For more information on Feral Trade see: http://www.feraltrade.org.

artist biographies

Kate Rich ate Rich is an Australian-born artist & trader. In the 1990s she moved to California to work as radio engineer with the Bureau of Inverse Technology (BIT), an international agency producing an array of critical information products including economic and ecologic indices, event-triggered webcam networks, and animal operated emergency broadcast devices. The Bureau’s work has been exhibited broadly in academic, scientific and museum contexts. Restless at the turn of the century, she headed further east to take up the post of Bar Manager at the Cube Microplex, Bristol UK where she launched Feral Trade, a public experiment trading goods over social networks. Feral Trade forges new ’wild’ trade routes across hybrid territories of business, art and social interaction. She is currently moving deeper into the infrastructure of cultural economy, developing protocols to define and manage amenities of hospitality, catering, sports and survival in the cultural realm. MORE >