Automate All the Things! symposium
January 2020 will be a busy month for Hyperemployment - Post-work, Online Labour and Automation, the year-long programme I co-curated with Janez Janša for Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana.
From January 7 to 10, 2020, Aksioma Project Space, Ljubljana will hosts a three days screening of Michael Mandiberg's Postmodern Times, a remake of Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times (1936) produced by asking 182 gig workers to re-enact scenes from the movie. The event will be followed on January 15, 2020 by the opening of Elisa Giardina Papa's solo show The Cleaning of Emotional Data, premiering the third take of the artist on digital labour after Technologies of Care and The Labor of Sleep.
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The opening of the show will be the closing event of AUTOMATE ALL THE THINGS!, a two days symposium starting on January 14 with my lecture at The Academy of Fine Arts and Design of the University of Ljubljana and completed on January 15 with artists lectures (Elisa Giardina Papa, Silvio Lorusso), a lecture-performance (Sebastian Schmieg) and a round table (Sanela Jahić, Michael Mandiberg, Sašo Sedlaček).
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AUTOMATE ALL THE THINGS! wants to explore a contradiction implicit in the increasing automation of work: is this process, which should apparently open up a new age of free time, no labour and universal basic income, instead turning humans into software agents, invisible slaves of the machines? Welcomed as a curse by the Luddites at the very beginning of the industrial age, throughout the 20th century, automation did not destroy human labour, but profoundly changed its organisation on a global scale. In the late-20th century, technological innovations brought automation to a brand new level, accelerating the shift toward a post-industrial economic model. Today, with many jobs previously run by humans becoming fully automated, the dream – or nightmare – of a post-work society seems closer than ever; and yet, at a closer look, automation in its current form isn’t destroying human labour. Rather, it is making it invisible.
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