Matthias Kispert

Capitalism doesn′t love me

Capitalism doesn′t love me takes disciplinary messages received from online gig economy platforms and translates them into soothing ASMR videos performed by sellers on the platform Fiverr. The messages themselves are illustrative of the Foucauldian-Kafkaesque power wielded by platforms over their users, a combination of total surveillance of all activities with opaque humans-machines hybrids who make decisions that can threaten someone′s livelihood while facing no accountability themselves.



Workers laughing alone for money

For Workers laughing alone for money, workers on the platform Microworkers have been paid $1 each to record themselves laughing for approximately one minute. This project plays both on the meme Women laughing alone with salad and the business self-help injunction ′fake it til you make it′. Workers on online clickwork platforms often work in isolation and under time pressure to find and complete as many lowpaying tasks as possible. What is one supposed to do when the pressure gets too much? Workers laughing alone for money suggests breaking out in a desolate burst of lonely laughter.

 


Workers leaving the cloud factory

For Workers leaving the cloud factory, online clickworkers on Amazon Mechanical Turk and Microworkers have been paid $2.50 each to film themselves leaving the place where they work. The project is a revisit of the Lumière brothers′ Workers leaving the factory from 1895 and continues a lineage that includes Harun Farocki′s Workers leaving the factory in eleven decades (2006) and Andrew Norman Wilson′s Workers leaving the Googleplex (2011). While in the Lumière film workers leave the factory as one workforce, in Workers leaving the cloud factory the protagonists are separate and the eerie emptiness of the soundtracks of the submitted videos evokes the atomised conditions under which much of this work occurs.


Artificial artificial intelligence

Artificial artificial intelligence deals with the digital assembly line work in which tasks that artificial intelligence cannot yet perform are broken up and distributed to workers who complete them on their computers or mobile phones. This configuration of humans imitating computers imitating humans is reenacted through a distributed reading of a conversation between two AI chatbots running on smart speakers that was streamed online in 2017 under the name seebotschat. For Artificial artificial intelligence, this exchange that originally occurred between two algorithms that mimic human conversation is voiced line-by-line by different workers on the platform Microworkers.

 

 

 

 


Keep your promises

Keep your promises is a series of activist videos created for the IWGB, a grassroots labour union that organises precarious workers, including those working on gig economy platforms. These videos have not been created as artworks, but as tools for action.



 

see more on: