The Labour of Automation

The Labour of Automation is an artistic research into the hidden human labour taking place within automated services and infrastructures.

Continuing from where my PhD thesis “Unwrapping COBOL – Lessons in Crisis Computing” left off, this research moves from the IT maintenance work in the outsourced back-back-offices of the network society to the labour of managing and training the data of artificial intelligence.

The research uses a transdisciplinary, intersectional approach to address labour displacement and the human factor in data-driven societies.

The driving question is how to make the invisible labour of automation visible and tangible, and beyond that, to discuss what changes this surfacing of labour could bring to future art and design practices. What would happen if we started to think of the labour of automation as core to design practice?

How would that affect the structure and overall design process, in education, research and industry? The research takes place across three institutions that correspond to its artistic and academic premises.

It intertwines back-ends and front-ends of automation (developers and users), artistic interventions (reverse-engineered AI) and installments (hybrid public events).

This project asks what a greater awareness of the labour asymmetries of automation can bring to design processes and further employs artistic research as a mode of intervention and creative surfacing of the issues at hand.