BINATIONAL ARTISTIC PhD-PROGRAM

Abstract

In Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle, the author describes the struggle of workers in the Chicago working class neighborhood Back of the Yards with the developments of the second industrial revolution. Referencing Sinclair’s work, as well as the fiber-optic cables that run the planetary, computational infrastructure of capital, in its title, this research project explores the impact of digital conditions on the lived reality of labor through artistic practice. It takes the artist/researcher’s personal experience of working as a package handler for a major international shipping company as point of departure to contribute to current discussions on the future of work. The shipping warehouse serves as a sample site, a heterotopia, that reveals conditions of digitally enhanced, manual labor today. 

The social and political relations as well as the technological infrastructure of the warehouse are deconstructed, reenacted, and extrapolated through the devices of a conceptual art practice that is situated in the fields of (new) media art and user experience design. In the process, methodical approaches from both of these fields are merged to prototype alternative visions of the future of work. The research proposes the perspective of the artist-as-worker and asks how a situatedness of the researcher in both class antagonisms and capitalist infrastructure space can be put into action in artistic research practice.

The findings of the research will be theoretically positioned in the current discourse on (post-)capitalist approaches to technology within the disciplines of media theory and political philosophy. At the same time the artistic outcomes seek to extend the project’s reach beyond both academia and art through means of expression connecting to pop- and subcultural phenomena. This includes interactive media environments, experimental electronic music, as well as science fiction narrative. 

In the combined effort of practice and theory, the project ultimately aims to formulate a particular, relatable, and empathetic perspective on the computational condition of work from which more just and emancipatory futures of work can be imagined, articulated, and eventually brought into being. These potential futures strive to account for both the technological affordances of digital technologies as well as the lived reality and immediate needs of workers.