<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=utf-8"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;">Dear Stephanie,<div><br></div><div>Thanks for all of this information about Invisible Threads and LOL. And apologies for the delayed replay. We have many Lebanese and French students, so the past week has been intense.</div><div><br></div><div>It’s fascinating how you came to conceive aspects of LOL and its provocative use of MTurk through the experience of running an unprofitable and unsustainable sweatshop in SL. Your “failed" entrepreneurship serves as a critique of outsourcing via digital labor. </div><div><br></div><div>I’m also fascinated by how the performance itself became part o the research for subsequent performance of Invisible Threads and for LOL. I’m wondering whether you (and perhaps Jeff too) could say more about how you collaboration enters into the projects? Do you work on everything together or divide tasks? I think that these projects are so thoughtful and multilayered that I’m interested to know more about how they came into being.</div><div><br></div><div>Best,</div><div>Dale</div><div><div apple-content-edited="true">
<div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;"><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;"><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;"><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;"><p class="MsoNormal" style="color: rgb(94, 94, 95); orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><br></p></div></div></div></div></div><div><div>On Nov 14, 2015, at 17:57, Stephanie Rothenberg <<a href="mailto:rothenberg.stephanie@gmail.com">rothenberg.stephanie@gmail.com</a>> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><div dir="ltr">
Dear All,<br><br>Apologies for jumping in late to the discussion. I’m actually writing this on a Transatlantic flight so it’s a bit long-winded! I’ve mainly outlined the projects and Jeff will chime in on a lot of aspects I left out. Look forward to hearing more on everyone else’s work within this section and making connections to the engaging discussion on the previous section.<br><br>Jeff and I created “Invisible Threads” in 2008 through an Eyebeam residency and fellowship. The project was a mixed reality “sweatshop” that existed in both the physical world and the virtual world of Second Life (SL). It was set up as a retail kiosk. The virtual sweatshop component manufactured real world designer jeans called Double Happiness Jeans. At the time, Second Life was all the rage with avatars featured on the cover of Business Week for making millions in virtual economies. Our goal for the project was to make this new circuit of production visible by designing a virtual business model that could leverage these emerging virtual currencies and new forms of digital labor and outsourcing. SL was a form of crowdsourcing in its early stages.<br><br>As SL mimicked much of the infrastructure of the real world, both economically and ideologically, we basically acted as virtual entrepreneurs doing what any new business does in getting a start-up off the ground (no pun intended). We placed job ads in the SL classifieds to hire factory workers and managers, conducted interviews on skills and scheduling, conducted job training for new hires, etc. We also hired a SL architect to design our factory. Throughout the project we performed the role of “bosses” – we hired and fired, dealt with employee squabbles on the factory floor.<br><br>But we also wanted to underscore the potential exploits of this business model, this new form of digital labor that was transitioning global factory workers from more traditional manufacturing economies into factory workers of the information society. Thus the representational route of the “sweatshop” and the absurd project title “Invisible Threads: A Virtual Sweatshop in Second Life” and the repetitive motion economics incurred through the virtual textile machines assembly line. Through this lens we could emphasize workers low hourly pay rates which were about 280 Lindens in the SL currency but approximately $0.90 in US dollars. We also leveraged the indentured servitude model and allotted every worker a small plot of land to inhabit next to the factory. They could use it only while employed at the factory.<br><br>This time period was also the beginning of the gamefication of everything. What became really interesting in the project that also touches on the collaborative aspect was this conflation of leisure and labor. During job interviews we would ask people-avatars why they wanted to work in a factory in this social space of leisure. They obviously weren’t making that much money (at least at our job) so it had to be something else. We began to see this mirroring of real life behaviors, values, ideologies from the real world into this supposedly transgressive space of play. Several of our employees had real world factory experience and liked the idea of working in a virtual factory.<br><br>The virtual factory floor also facilitated more of a team-based work environment. Unlike other jobs in SL that were more solo such as being a Greeter (literally saying hello to avatars as they were transported to your location), the factory enabled friendships to happen and worker camaraderie to form. And to a large extent it somewhat reversed the Taylorist division of labor on the assembly line. In its just-in-time production model, workers got to meet the actual customers ordering the jeans as this took place through a webcam. They could also see the fruits of their labor as the customers would often show the workers the final finished jeans by holding them up in front of the webcam.<br><br>Although the jeans were a smashing hit at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, Jeff and I were lousy virtual entrepreneurs and were losing money on the business. So we came up with a new product that was less costly and could also leverage a more robust crowdsourcing platform that was gaining popularity called Mechanical Turk (mTurk) and created by <a href="http://Amazon.com">Amazon.com</a>. “Laborers of Love (LOL),” created in various stages from 2010-2012 (and is still online so try it) is an adult entertainment website that outsources your intimate fantasies. Through an online form and a Paypal account you can create a fantasy that gets outsourced to an anonymous group of mTurk workers. The higher the price, meaning the more you are willing to pay, the faster you get it because your HITS (mturk job tasks) are worth more money. What the project ultimately does is map out the distributed production of your fantasy in real time through our web interface. You can watch it get made through a real time global map – see workers taking the mTurk HITS and where they are geographically located via their IP addresses.<br><br>When you enter your fantasy it gets broken down into 3 parts so the workers only get a fragment. And since they are working via mTurk, they are not specifically sex workers. These aspects of the project leave a very interesting space for thinking about how interpretation can happen through anonymous collaboration and how in this project it mediates desire.<br><br>Cheers, Stephanie<br><br><div> <br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div>
<div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Nov 11, 2015 at 5:15 PM, Dale Hudson <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:dale.hudson@nyu.edu" target="_blank">dale.hudson@nyu.edu</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------<br><div style="word-wrap:break-word"><font face="Arial"><b><span style="line-height:18px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">10–16 November 2015:
TRANSNATIONAL COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH/PRACTICE</span><br style="line-height:18px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)"></b><br style="line-height:18px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)"><span style="line-height:18px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">We continue the discussion of potentials and limitations of thinking through digital media into the area of transnational collaboration in research/practice with a few examples of projects that we discuss in our book. </span><br style="line-height:18px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)"><span style="line-height:18px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)"><br></span></font><div><font face="Arial"><span style="line-height:18px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">These projects foreground collaboration — not in the sense of “interaction” or “participation” that are promoted by corporations and increasingly by states, all of which have well-publicized links to data collection and surveillance — but collaboration in ways that foregrounds ethical and political considerations.<b>CAMP’</b>s <i>From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf</i> is a collaborative project that <b>Shaina Anand and Ashok Sukaran</b> developed in collaboration with migrant sailers who transport goods between India and Pakistan, Iran and the Arabian Gulf, and East Africa. The film is compiled from videos that the sailers make and exchange with one another, mostly set to music that evokes their experience of months at sea away from family and friends. The videos are not made with us in mind as an audience. With the increased attention to the history of the Indian Ocean World, FGtGtG helps us visualize the continuum of cultural and economic exchanges that predate the violent interruption of European colonialism that carved the region into strategic areas of study/control that have encouraged sectarian violence. Unlike conventional documentary, FGtGtG foregrounds emotion and unknowability over facts and evidence; it does not pretend to interpret the lives of the sailers for us. </span><br style="line-height:18px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)"><br style="line-height:18px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)"><span style="line-height:18px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">Two projects by <b>Stephanie Rothenberg and Jeff Crouse</b> facilitate opportunities for us to think about the ways that we might be (and most likely are) complicit with the exploitation of labor. They do as much, however, with a sense of humor, which is often necessary to get us to drop our defenses and pretenses. <i>Invisible Threads</i> is a locative media project that makes the invisible power structures of just-in-time production visible and wearable. It moves from the virtual world of social networking and role-playing in Second Life to the physical world in live performance. Comparably, <i>Laborers of Love (LOL)</i> prompts us to think about the outsourcing to (relatively) anonymous workers through Amazon’s MTurk as well as the fetishization of glitch art. The project’s online platform allows us to commission adult video with settings for customized content and glitches, as a means to reflect upon the immodest ways that neoliberalism’s flexible systems are promoted (sometimes even erotically) as simulating economic growth. </span><br style="line-height:18px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)"><br><span style="line-height:18px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)"><b>Leila Nadir and Cary Peppermint</b>’s <i>Intermediate Hikes (IH+)</i> is a mobile-phone app that creates occasions for planned and unplanned collaboration between human participants and the nonhuman world. The project is an application of critical theory into media practice that prompts us to think about a number of interrelated issues concerning urbanism, environmentalism, eco-tourism, and anthropocentrism. Some of the task cards ask us to move outside our comfort zones in order to approximate, if not inhabit, the perspectives of others. The project thus facilitates a variety of self-conscious experiences (and maybe some unconscious ones) that open interactions not only with other participants but also with the nonhuman world as vital and agentive rather than as “wilderness." The project gets us to engage in a critical mode rather than lapsing into a touristic mode when confronting difference as well as uses of land. IH+ allows us to engage in research through practice. </span><br style="line-height:18px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)"><br><span style="line-height:18px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">We invite our guests to write more about these projects as well as their current and other previous ones. </span><br style="line-height:18px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)"><br><span style="line-height:18px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">Best, </span><br style="line-height:18px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)"><span style="line-height:18px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">Dale and Patty </span><br style="line-height:18px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)"><br style="line-height:18px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)"><br style="line-height:18px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)"><br style="line-height:18px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)"><span style="line-height:18px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)"><b>Guest biographies </b></span><br style="line-height:18px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)"><br style="line-height:18px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)"><b><span style="line-height:18px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">Shaina Anand and Ashok Sukaran, CAMP (From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf), India </span><br style="line-height:18px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)"></b><span style="line-height:18px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">CAMP (<a href="http://studio.camp/" target="_blank">http://studio.camp/</a>)is a collaborative studio founded in 2007. It combines film, video, installation, software, open-access archives with broad interests in technology, film and theory. From their home base in Chuim village, CAMP are co-initiators of the online footage archive</span><span style="line-height:18px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)"> (<a href="http://pad.ma/" target="_blank">http://pad.ma/</a>), the new cinema archive </span><span style="line-height:18px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">(<a href="http://indiancine.ma/" target="_blank">http://indiancine.ma/</a>), and a new project on cultural histories of Bombay. CAMP's work has shown extensively including at the MoMA and New Museum, the BFI London Film Festival, the Viennale, at dOCUMENTA 13, Sharjah Biennial, Shanghai Biennial, Kochi-Muziris Biennial, and museums and film festivals around the world. In 2015, they presented a major survey of their works across five solo exhibitions titled As If I- V in Kolkata, Delhi and Mumbai. </span><br style="line-height:18px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)"><span style="line-height:18px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)"><br></span></font></div><div><font face="Arial"><b><span style="line-height:18px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">Stephanie Rothenberg (Invisible Threads, Laborers of Love LOL), United States </span><br style="line-height:18px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)"></b><span style="line-height:18px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">Stephanie Rothenberg is an interdisciplinary artist using performance, installation and networked media to create provocative public interactions. Mixing real and virtual spaces, her work explores the power dynamics between contemporary visions of utopian urbanization and real world economic, political and environmental factors. She has exhibited throughout the US and internationally in venues including Eyebeam, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), the Sundance Film Festival, House of Electronic Arts (HeK), LABoral, Transmediale and ZKM Center for Art & Media. She is a recipient of numerous awards, most recently from the Harpo Foundation and Creative Capital. Residencies include the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) Workspace, Eyebeam Art and Technology and the Santa Fe Art Institute. Her work is in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art and has been widely reviewed including Artforum, Artnet, The Brooklyn Rail and Hyperallergic. She is Associate Professor in the Department of Art at SUNY Buffalo where she teaches courses in design and emerging technologies. </span><br style="line-height:18px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)"><span style="line-height:18px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)"><br></span></font></div><div><font face="Arial"><b><span style="line-height:18px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">Jeff Crouse (Invisible Threads, Laborers of Love LOL), United States </span></b><br style="line-height:18px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)"><span style="line-height:18px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">Jeff Crouse creates software and installations using generative graphics, crowdsourcing, computer vision, physical computing, projection, popular web platforms, parody, and satire. His projects range from absurd critical commentary on technology to commercial immersive experiences using new technologies. His work has been shown at The Sundance Film Festival, Laboral Art Center in Gíjon, Spain, The Performa biennial, The Eyebeam Art & Technology Center, the storytelling series, StoryCollider, The Obie Awards, and featured in the Berkeley Art Museum Net Art. He has received grants from Rhizome and Turbulence, and has completed residencies at Eyebeam and Minneapolis Art on Wheels. His clients have included companies such as Samsung, IBM, and Intel, and institutions such as the National Building Museum, Moogfest, and the Barbican Museum. He has pieces on permanent display in Dayton, Ohio, and Beirut, Lebanon. Jeff received his MS from the Digital Media program at Georgia Tech in 2006 and then joined Eyebeam as a fellow from 2007-2010. He is currently a partner and creative technology director at the experience lab, Odd Division, and founder of experimental software studio, See-through Lab. </span><br style="line-height:18px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)"><span style="line-height:18px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)"><br></span></font></div><div><font face="Arial"><b><span style="line-height:18px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">Leila Nadir and Cary Peppermint (Indeterminate Hikes IH+), United States </span><br style="line-height:18px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)"></b><span style="line-height:18px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">Leila Nadir and Cary Peppermint have been working together for over a decade to investigate contemporary experiences of food, ecology, media, and memory. Working simultaneously as artists, teachers, and critics, and sometimes known as EcoArtTech, they create participatory situations and social sculptures that facilitate recovery from a cultural memory disorder that they call “industrial amnesia.” Through open-ended, experimental collaborations with the public, their projects bring endangered food and environmental practices into poetic visibility, feeling-perception, and the simple acts of everyday life and have taken form as architectural interventions and urban wilderness tours, net art and public performances, scholarly articles and poetic essays. Leila and Cary have earned support from Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Center for Land Use Interpretation, New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, K2 Family Foundation, Culture Push, Franklin Furnace Fund, and numerous academic fellowships. Their performances, exhibitions, and lectures have taken place at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Postmasters Gallery, New York University, 319 Scholes, Smackmellon Gallery, Exit Art, U.C.L.A., M.I.T. Media Lab, ISEA 2012, Banff New Media Institute, European Media Art Festival, Parsons The New School for Design, and the Neuberger Museum of Art, and their work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum, Walker Art Center, <a href="http://rhizome.org/" target="_blank">Rhizome.org</a> (<a href="http://rhizome.org/" target="_blank">http://Rhizome.org</a>), <a href="http://turbulence.org/" target="_blank">Turbulence.org</a> (<a href="http://turbulence.org/" target="_blank">http://Turbulence.org</a>) of New Radio & Performing Arts, and Cornell University Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art.</span></font></div></div><br>_______________________________________________<br>
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<a href="http://empyre.library.cornell.edu/" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">http://empyre.library.cornell.edu</a><br></blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><div><br></div>-- <br><div class="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr" style="font-size:small">Stephanie Rothenberg</div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size:small">Associate Professor, Department of Art, SUNY Buffalo<br></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size:small"><a href="mailto:rothenberg.stephanie@gmail.com" style="color:rgb(17,85,204)" target="_blank">rothenberg.stephanie@gmail.com</a><br><a href="http://www.stephanierothenberg.com/" style="color:rgb(17,85,204)" target="_blank">www.stephanierothenberg.com</a><br></div><br></div></div></div></div></div>
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