[-empyre-] week two | transnational collaboration research/practice

[Stephanie Rothenberg]

 Dear All,

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Amazon.com.
“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.

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.

Cheers, Stephanie





On Wed, Nov 11, 2015 at 5:15 PM, Dale Hudson <dale.hudson at nyu.edu> wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>
> *10–16 November 2015: TRANSNATIONAL COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH/PRACTICE*
> 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.
>
> 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.*CAMP’*s *From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf*
> is a collaborative project that *Shaina Anand and Ashok Sukaran*
> 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.
>
> Two projects by *Stephanie Rothenberg and Jeff Crouse* 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. *Invisible Threads* 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, *Laborers of Love (LOL)* 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.
>
> *Leila Nadir and Cary Peppermint*’s *Intermediate Hikes (IH+)* 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.
>
> We invite our guests to write more about these projects as well as their
> current and other previous ones.
>
> Best,
> Dale and Patty
>
>
>
> *Guest biographies *
>
>
> *Shaina Anand and Ashok Sukaran, CAMP (From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf), India *CAMP
> (http://studio.camp/)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 (
> http://pad.ma/), the new cinema archive (http://indiancine.ma/), 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.
>
>
> *Stephanie Rothenberg (Invisible Threads, Laborers of Love LOL), United
> States *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.
>
> *Jeff Crouse (Invisible Threads, Laborers of Love LOL), United States *
> 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.
>
>
> *Leila Nadir and Cary Peppermint (Indeterminate Hikes IH+), United States *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, Rhizome.org (
> http://Rhizome.org), Turbulence.org (http://Turbulence.org) of New Radio
> & Performing Arts, and Cornell University Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media
> Art.
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>



-- 
Stephanie Rothenberg
Associate Professor, Department of Art, SUNY Buffalo
rothenberg.stephanie at gmail.com
www.stephanierothenberg.com
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