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.