hyperemployment

Human in the Loop. Visualizzare la massa invisibile

Texts

L’effimero tangibile. Dal reale al virtuale: arti, spettacolo e prospettive di comunicazione digitale (GBE, Roma 2021) è una raccolta di saggi che offre un campione della produzione scientifica del Dottorato di Ricerca Digital Humanities. Comunicazione e nuovi media organizzato dall’Università di Genova, a cui ho avuto l’onore di prendere parte dal 2006 al 2009. La raccolta include un mio contributo, in italiano, sui temi che hanno nutrito la mostra e il progetto editoriale Hyperemployment: lavoro invisibile, intelligenza artificiale, postcapitalismo, automazione… Tra gli artisti discussi, Sebastian Schmieg, UBERMORGEN, Andrew Norman Wilson, Guido Segni, Eva e Franco Mattes, Michael Mandiberg, Elisa Giardina Papa.

Domenico Quaranta, “«Human in the Loop». Visualizzare la massa invisibile”, in Maurizia Migliorini, Sergio Poli (a cura di), L’effimero tangibile. Dal reale al virtuale: arti, spettacolo e prospettive, di comunicazione digitale, GBE / Ginevra Bentivoglio EditoriA, Roma 2021, pp. 201 – 212. PDF DOWNLOAD

“A ten years old optimistic take on the internet may look childish in a post Snowden society.” Interview by Pina Gabrijan

Texts

Some days ago, Slovenian writer Pina Gabrijan sent me a few questions for an article about Aksioma‘s series of conferences and seminars Tactics & Practice, that have been taking place for ten years. It was a good chance to discuss about time and technologies, the recent history of digital culture and media art, automation and hyperemployment, and of course NFTs. The article is now online in Slovenian, and the English Q & A is available below.

Automate all the Things! at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design of the University of Ljubljana and Moderna galerija, Ljubljana, January 14–15, 2020. Photo: Domen Pal / Aksioma
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Hyper-Employment, dalla rivoluzione delle nostre vite a una prospettiva post-capitalistica?

Texts

“Sono un critico e curatore di arte contemporanea, non un filosofo, uno storico, un sociologo, un economista né tanto meno un profeta. Se Hyper-employment ti ha suggerito che possa esprimere una opinione autorevole su questioni di questo tipo, è perché mi sono lasciato condurre per mano da alcuni artisti che amo, ho fatto mia la loro analisi del mondo contemporaneo, mi sono interrogato sulle loro visioni di futuro. Lo dico non tanto per deresponsabilizzarmi da quello che dico, quanto per sottolineare un fatto per me importante: il ruolo cruciale delle arti e degli artisti, mai come oggi “utili” a generare comprensione della complessità del presente e a concretizzare specifiche idee di futuro. ”

Federico Di Vita mi ha intervistato su Hyperemployment per Elle Decor. Qui l’intervista integrale, che affronta questioni come l’impatto delle tecnologie sulla nostra quotidianità, automazione e fine del lavoro, arte e cultura hacker, il rapporto con la casa, la fine del tempo libero…

If Work Becomes Our Life. Interview on Domus

Exhibitions, Texts
Guido Segni, Demand Full Laziness, 2018 – 2023. Installation view, Hyperemployment, MGLC – International Centre of Graphic Arts, November 7, 2019 – January 19, 2020. Photo: Jaka Babnik. Archive: MGLC, Aksioma.

In this interview made by Bianca Felicori for Domus Magazine, we discuss about the evolution of work, the death of free time, the occupation of domestic space and other themes addressed in Hyperemployment, the book recently published by NERO as the final output of the Hyperemployment annual programme.

The interview is available in Italian as well. Here my favorite quote:

“If, right now, I’m doing this interview instead of playing with my kids, watching a movie or scrolling through Tik Tok, it’s not just because it helps me sell a book – it’s because it connects me to you, and potentially to other people; because it entertains me, it makes me feel accomplished and alive, an active member of a community; it makes me feel, with a little postmodern embarrassment, on a mission. If, after this work is over, we continue to “work”, it is because these ideals have survived.”

Hyperemployment – Post-work, Online Labour and Automation

Exhibitions, Texts

The Hyperemployment book is out! One year after the launch of the Hyperemployment programme, this precious tiny book co-published by Aksioma and NERO sums up the project and improves it with the help of new essays by Silvio Lorusso and Luciana Parisi, and a conversation between !Mediengruppe Bitnik and Felix Stadler (also available here).

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Automate All The Things! Reviewed

Exhibitions
Sebastian Schmieg, I Will Say Whatever You Want In Front Of A Pizza, 2017. Screenshot.

A nice review of the Automate All The Things! symposium in Ljubljana, written by writer and curator Aude Launay, is now available on the Frech free magazine 02, both in print (Spring 2020, pp. 88 – 89) and online. Held on January 14 and 15, 2020 at the The Academy of Fine Arts and Moderna galerija, Ljubljana, Automate All The Things! is part of Hyperemployment programme.

“At the end of 2006, when everyone was starting to benefit from their 15 minutes of pixelated celebrity with the advent of the social network that we know, another platform was making a place for itself on another market, not that of hyper-individualization but, on the contrary, of the invisibilization of individuals, turning them into a crowd of  anonymous dogsbodies exploited at will: Amazon Mechanical Turk. This “global, on-demand, 24×7 workforce,” as the website of the giant of the neo-gig economy1proclaims, is conceived as an actualization of the deception that was already simulating artificial intelligence in 1770,the famous Mechanical Turk who amazed the European elite by surpassing them in chess. Two and a half centuries later, artificial intelligence is still artificial and humans are still in the machine.Total automation remains a trick, so what has changed?It is around this question of humans “as invisible slaves of the machines” that curators Domenico Quaranta and Janez Janša brought together a panel of artist-researchers for an exciting symposium in mid-January, as part of the the year-long Hyperemployment programme they are organising for Aksioma, the ultra-dynamic project space in Ljubljana.” Go on reading on 02 magazine’s website.

Hyperemployment

Exhibitions

Exhibition curated by Domenico Quaranta

Venue: MGLC – International Centre of Graphic Arts, Ljubljana

When: November 7, 2019–January 19, 2020

Exhibition opening and guided tour by the curator: Thursday, November 7, 2019 at 6 PM

Featured artists: Danilo Correale, Elisa Giardina Papa, Sanela Jahić, Silvio Lorusso, Jonas Lund, Michael Mandiberg, Sebastian Schmieg, Guido Segni.

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Hyperemployment – Post-work, Online Labour and Automation

Exhibitions

Download the program!

In the current phase of late capitalism, we are experiencing a crucial contradiction every day. On the one hand, the increasing automation of productive processes is apparently making John Maynard Keynes’s promise of a post-work society not only more real, but also closer; on the other hand, labour – far from disappearing – is colonising and altering any given moment and aspect of our existence. The rise of precarious labour has freed us from the alienation of a permanent job, but has also made our lives more unstable and anxious, and is producing new social diseases. The increasing automation has made us more unemployed – a condition we are frantically trying to escape with micro-labours, turning us into “entrepreneurs of the self”.

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