TOP KEYWORDS
Index of Titles Filed Under 'Labor and Technology'
Like all collaborative endeavors, bringing together an edited collection is about fixing as much as gathering the insights and details (and yes, flaws and limits) of individually or jointly conceived pieces to bring about a larger conversational whole – a drawing forth, or drawing together, of scattered threads and pieces into something considerably messier than a quilt. All the more so when the collection is the result of a generative collaboration, bringing guest editors Lara Houston, Daniela K. Rosner, Steven J. Jackson in conversation with the continent. collective to present this special issue “R3pair Volume”. The conversation of course runs ...
Désoeuvrement! Variously translated as unworking or inoperativity is a notion that haunts contemporary political theory and practice. Unworking overturns the typical valuation of work and action as positive and constructive and opens an avenue to think radical passivity and inactivity as aesthetic and political practices that question the modernist mantra of purposeful production and ceaseless activity. At its most basic, unworking is the critique of work and of everything that we imagine as such. The work of community-building for instance, the work of art, work as wage labour, even psychoanalysis, imagined as ‘working through’. This issue of continent is dedicated to unworking in its various guises. ...
Droste Effect Bulletin 15: Art & Automation: for an Apologia of Leisure Time
Droste Effect Bulletins
Robotics and soft AI are bringing everyday changes both to the work field and to our free time. How does this condition reflect itself on the artistic practice? Can we humans liberate ourselves from our anthropocentric viewpoint and accept the intellective superiority of machines? Will we be able to overcome our fear of automation? In the utopian view of a fully automated production, not only work ethics should be re-thought, but also our certainties about aesthetics.
The critique of bureaucracy slithers like a sewer—hidden, warm, and necessary—beneath the aging towers of the twentieth-century intellectual metropolis. Arising first as one answer to The Question—namely, what happened in the USSR?—bureaucracy eventually came to replace the bourgeoisie as the preferred explanation for why everything was the way it was. To this day, pseudonyms for bureaucracy remain highly fashionable pieces of conceptual hyperbole. Any characterization of instituted sociality as uniform unfreedom—the spectacle, the body without organs, libidinal economics, Empire, Bloom—has its origins in the bureaucratic obsession with control, as distinct from the bourgeois obsession with ownership.
In “The Great Accelerator,” Oleksiy ...
Indentured to the past, we drag our inherited identities through a forest of networks bursting with mysterious intellectual fruit. We’re not sure which concepts are poisonous and which are safe. History is like a mistranslated phrasebook full of old-fashioned illustrations which everyone makes fun of on the internet. Attempts at organization feel fanciful and absurd: eclectic inventories of apocalypse-kitsch. In “A Palace of Unsaids,” Rob Goyanes considers the work of mourning under twenty-first century conditions. Does it matter if we show up to the wrong shift at the memorial-factory as long as we do our time?
Those that insist on mourning ...
The authors reflect on the relationship between labor and technology in urban space where communication, attention, and physical movement generate financial value for a small number of private stakeholders. Online and off, Internet users are increasingly wielded as a resource for economic amelioration, for private capture, and the channels of communication are becoming increasingly inscrutable. Liu and Scholz ask: How does the intertwining of labor and play complicate our understanding of exploitation?
For more than thirty years Farocki has been a filmmaker, documentarist, film-essayist and installation artist. What preoccupies him above all is not so much an image of life, but the life of images, as they surround us in the newspapers, the cinema, history books, user manuals, posters, CCTV footage and advertising. His vast oeuvre of some sixty films includes three feature films (Zwischen den Kriegen/Between the Wars, Etwas wird sichtbar: Vietnam/In Your Eyes: Vietnam, Wie Man sieht/As You See), essay films (e.g. Images of the World-Inscription of War), critical media-pieces, experimental work, children’s features for television, historical film essays (e.g. ...
A screening and discussion of films on recent struggles in the logistics sector.
BBC, Panaroma: Amazon’s Truth Behind the Click, 2013
Maria Elena Scandaliato, Sciopero Generale Logistica, 2013
Cinema Action, Dock Strike 1972
Films and clips from Oakland, Bologna, Ellwood and more…
Guest speakers from Angry Workers of the World [http://angryworkersworld.wordpress.com/]
Pamphlet Contents:
Brian Ashton
The Factory Without Walls (short version)
Wildcat
Umschlagspunkt
Angry Workers of the World
(Wealmoor Leaflet)
Angry Workers of the World
(Jack Wills Leaflet)
UniNomade
Circuits of Recomposition: Towards and Beyond
the #22M Logistics Workers’ Strike
Society of Enemies
Blockading the Port Is Only The First of Many Last Resorts
Further Resources:
Brian Ashton, ‘Logistics and The Factory Without Walls’ (long version)
http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/logistics-and-factory-without-walls
Jasper Bernes, ‘Logistics, Counterlogistics ...
Losers and Winners
A documentary by Ulrike Franke and Michael Loeken Germany 2006, 96 mins
For one and a half years, filmmakers Ulrike Franke and Michael Loeken watch as a gigantic industrial site is dismantled, documenting the stories accompanying its disappearance: how the coke workers in the industrial Ruhr Region experience the arrival and working methods of the Chinese, their feelings upon seeing their pride in their work vanish along with what was the most modern coke factory in the world, but also the strain and conflicts the Chinese workers face during their 60-hour work week far away from home and family, ...
A zine published by The Creative Independent, compiling quotes, excerpts, and recommendations from working artists, all gathered from our archive. Topics covered include making money through your art, financial planning, day jobs, and starting a creative business. Yumna Al-Arashi’s real talk on earning money through your art, Philip Glass on getting paid for what you make, and Ally-Jane Grossan on how to approach financial planning.
Alysabeth Alexander and I recorded this conversation a few hours before the Service Employees International Union (in which she has important responsibilities) filed a lawsuit against the city of San Francisco, Google and Apple for deliberately ignoring the environmental impact that the tech industry buses (aka google buses) have on the Californian city in their daily use. The environmental aspect of the buses is the one that has been chosen for the lawsuit, yet the main political consequence of their very function is the rampant gentrification that accompany their routes. In this conversation, Alysabeth describes the various actions that the ...
Progress in autonomy cannot be – nor historically has it ever been – measured in quantitative units. Rather, the need for autonomy is repositioned in relation to society’s political, economic, and cultural developments on an ongoing basis. What do we mean when we speak of ‘autonomy’ and ‘reproduction’ in the field of contemporary art? What kind of objects do these terms encompass, what are their histories, and what internal logical relations can we identify between these concepts? How do they operate in a philosophical discourse about art and in political theory and practice?
In this book, Marina Vishmidt and Kerstin Stakemeier ...
We think of technology as a basket of broken eggs, which must hatch into chicks. Our contemplation is that we must accept disadvantage as advantage, that we must lead ourselves into a den of a lion, and sleep close to its mane.
The starting point was an identification of eternity. It‘s difficult to agree with James Blunt: ―Forever is just a minute to me.‖ For, in the initial analysis, technology is to us what a mustard seed is to a sea. There is, we beg, no specificity to an outlook on technology.
But what does an unwholesome consideration entail? How can we ...
Shifter is a topical magazine that was founded in 2004 by Sreshta Premnath, who continues to edit the magazine in collaboration with guest editors. Originally concieved as an online magazine in order to create an inter-continential “commons,” Shifter introduced a print version with issue 10. This additional format allowed for an increased approachablity for longer articles as well as additional access to the content for an audience beyond those with high-speed internet. A portion of this issue of Shifter is also published in Rethinking Marxism (Volume 23 Issue 2).
The Dove on the Roof and The VW Complex
Sunday 26 February | Doors 7pm | Admission free
The Dove on the Roof / Die Taube auf dem Dach
By Iris Gusner
Germany (GDR), 1973, 84 mins
The VW Complex /Der VW-Komplex
By Hartmut Bitomsky Germany, 1990, 93 mins
http://unemployedcinema.blogspot.com
“What are you up to?” asks Worker 7: bot? virtual boyfriend in a computer-generated voice. She replies that she’s busy. As the conversation unfolds, the artist and the online worker, who may or may not be a bot, struggle to understand and connect with each other.
Empathy, digital labor, and new ways to serve and care on the network are the subjects explored in Elisa Giardina Papa’s Technologies of Care, commissioned by Rhizome for the Download. Giardina Papa presents portraits of online workers in a 26MB ZIP file; six are identified as women, plus the possible bot. Each portrait is its ...
The Wages for Facebook manifesto appeared anonymously online in 2014. Its website consists of a single page with the manifesto written in bold letters scrolling automatically, denying visitors the ability to use the patented swipe gesture or the scrollbar.
Wages for Facebook refers to a 1975 text “Wages against Housework” by Silvia Federici, the feminist author and activist, which addressed the invisible role played by women’s affective labor as mothers, wives, and housewives (although not exclusively) in sustaining capitalism. In the same vein, Wages for Facebook demands that our time spent online, on social media platforms be recognized for what it is: ...
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