Vertical Integration
Sept. 19, 2024
Columbia University
Extractive Media, Center for Comparative Media
Backwards integration in the language of capitalism (Reliance in India uses this as a self-description of its journey from textiles to gas exploration, Amazon’s warehouse automation and its own products are examples) is to go backwards from your product, to constituent raw materials and processes, usually as a way of guaranteeing the supply chain. We (CAMP) are proposing this term to think more broadly about extraction, waste, dependency, rear-guarding, mediatic conversions, in- and out-sourcing, and other aspects of such chains of translation and steps of decision and production.
Forward integration is to try to convert such infrastructural capacity into new consumer facing “products”: museums, film production (Reliance again), consumer goods, but also, each of their specific bets on the future. There are many examples of governments, political parties, corporations, families and other smaller assemblages, attempting to “forward integrate” into culture.
We think it is useful to assess such vertical moves for artistic practice today, both as analysis and possibility. Our practice suggests concepts and techniques on this axis: privilege escalations, parasitisms, sensorial extensions and "sacrifices", among types of actions performed at each layer, each moment of dependency or conversion. In this way, art is not only the “content” of someone else’s infrastructure but is testing and modifying the chains of its own existence.
In these stories of vertical integration, we describe downstream and upstream effects and potentials of long-running open-access projects, a reading of media theory in vertical terms, a story about the British Museum in small-town India, another about CCTV cinematography – how a bit of “vertical" thinking and doing may help us all.
