Cosmic ↔ Social · Performance

Kitty Kitty Wi-Fi

August 2011 · Computer History Museum, Silicon Valley, California

Kitty Kitty Wi-Fi

A live venture capital pitch performed as conceptual art: Wi-Fi for cats, pitched at a startup competition inside a building filled with the material evidence of previous generations' absurd-then-realized ideas. An investor handed Warren cash before he left the room—completing the artwork. The capital transfer is the climax and the critical argument simultaneously: the art market and the venture market operate by the same logic, and the performance made the two indistinguishable in a single transaction.

From the artist's own account, archived on the original site: “There is a space between possibility and absurdity that is a lovely place to play, and because possibilities become exponential, ideas build themselves and I am merely the channel from the way it will be.” That sentence underwrites every large-scale project that followed.

Kitty Kitty Wi-Fi — pitch performance, Computer History Museum.

Lineage — Chris Burden's use of real risk as medium, Andrea Fraser's institutional-critique performances staged inside real art-market transactions, and Santiago Sierra's use of real labor contracts and payments as material — the tradition of art whose medium is an actual economic or institutional event rather than its representation. Kitty Kitty Wi-Fi adds the comic register that none of them used, and relocates the transaction from the gallery to the startup pitch.

Apparatus a live pitch, a startup-competition stage inside the Computer History Museum, and an investor's cash. The performance required no other materials.