Autonomous labor and its attendant values have now become familiar tools
of neoliberal capitalism: work has become freelance, flexible, mobile,
project-based, hybrid and temporary. If these conditions are novel to
the general economy, this way of working is not new to artists, who
began experiencing these precarious conditions long before Post-Fordism
was a buzzword. The contributors to Mobile Autonomy, drawn from a
variety of disciplines including art, political philosophy and
sociology, examine the alternate working methods and economic models
developed, in theory and in practice, by artists and other creative
professionals to make artistic work viable in contemporary social,
economic and political conditions. As Nico Dockx and Pascal Gielen put
it in their introduction to this volume: "We need to stay mobile to keep
our autonomy alive, and we need to develop new autonomous practices to
keep our mobility alive."