Technologies of Care, Online Worker Stories

technologiesofcare

Part of “The Download” series, and as such fully downloadable from Rhizome, who commissioned the piece, “Technologies of Care” by artist Elisa Giardina Papa consists of portraits of different types of online workers, six of whom are identified as women, plus a possible bot. They are structured as interviews with those who practice what the artist defines as “network-based affective labor”. The artist is a researcher, who, very importantly, hires the respective workers, whether real or bots. Once played, each interview takes over the viewer’s browser through a script that can only be watched and listened to with slowly rotating 3D shapes obtained from the workers’ domestic environments. Precarity, the negotiation of identities and personal working environments are some of the emerging key elements from the online relationship between the commissioner and worker. The narrated stories become then the vivid and abstracted human beings that remain once the interface is removed.

 

Elisa Giardina Papa – Technologies of Care/Worker 1