2015
Soft Skill: Mastering Online Performance was conceived by Campbell Carolan as a hypothetical communications agency, staged at the interface of public and private relations. press release 
Staged in the basement theatre of Red Bull Arts on April 9th, 2015 as part of an educational series highlighting the utility of digital technology, an audience-led critique formed the bulk of the event, challenging the “intersection” of culture and technology as autonomous from that of labor and politics.
As the Web 2.0 platform economy emerged, we noticed a tendency to couch exploitation in the emotional language of partnership: the “high touch” business landscape imposes “commitment”, “passion,” and “support” as industry standards.
By contrast, words such as “consistency”, “respect”, “mutual benefit”, “support” and “reliability” pepper lonely hearts listings— alongside contractual obligations (“long term” or “NSA”?), and even vacation packages.
The project debuted as a public workshop that merged Brechtian performance method with strategic marketing how-to. Writer and experimental educator Ana Cecelia Alvarez presented on the narrative structure of UX design; meanwhile, Campbell Carolan played the role of researchers, consultants, and strategic communications experts in the burgeoning field of “profile identity design”.
Live users were asked to identify the narrative structure of audience volunteers profiles on LinkedIn, OK Cupid, Ashley Madison, EHarmony— followed by a live profile audit and consultation.
Commissioned as a supplement to Ryder Ripp’s solo exhibition, Alone Together, in the main hall of Red Bull Arts, SS:MOP mirrored the spatial framework of Ripp’s durational performance, inverting the relationship between labor and performance.
Rather than drawing allusions to the means by which immaterial labor practices constitute a social body that is “alone together,” we focused on the realities in which users are together and alone. The result was a collaborative critique of connection in the context of workplace competition, with Ripp’s participation as an audience member catalyzing the fraught relationship between culture and capital in the age of Web 2.0.
Press material for the work included an algorithmic rewrite of Donna Haraway’s seminal “Cyborg Manifesto”— the word “cyborg” replaces “couple”; “seduction” stands in for production.
Also included was a promotional website that functioned as a “parked domain”. Our design decisions exposed the seedy undercurrents of immaterial production. (The “Soft Skills” logo is a direct ripoff of LinkedIn.)
Ripp’s exhibition catalogue, a bandanna designed after the Isis flag, was noted as “bold”; yet a significant portion of our marketing collateral was deemed too controversial to include.
So they ended up on the jogging