Hi Everyone,
I know this is a poor netiquette but I am going to make a long post here.
I wanted to share with you this slightly tidied up (for ease of reading)
conversation I have just had over email with Charlotte Webb, an artist
working with a newly formed organisation called Glasshouse made up
Charlotte, Tom Berman (developer & hacker) and Joseph Connor (VC and
digital artist). I wanted to invite her to get involved in The
Netartizens Project by talking about ‘The Work We Want’, their project
about digital labour: http://www.workwewant.com/
I started by watching a video of their presentation at the Southbank
Centre for the Web We Want festival:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNxtpliAWSA
It describes how they outsourced a competition brief set at Hack the Space
http://www.thespace.org/artwork/view/hackthespace
----------------------------------------
Ruth: I am wondering how best to approach the interview.
Especially for the people on the Netbehaviour list, I think that the way
the project moves between art and entrepreneurial strategies will be
very provocative (I find it very provocative).
btw Do you know A Crowded Apocalypse by IOCOSE - an artist group who
out-sourced/crowdsourced conspiracy theories and global protests.
http://www.iocose.org/works/a_crowded_apocalypse.html
Charlotte:
Hmm - yes, it's really tricky because questions about digital labour in
relation to art practice, the knowledge economy, crowdsourcing cultural
production, affective labour etc are related but distinct from questions
about digital labour relating to more general 'work'.
What I think this reveals is that questions of exploitation need to be
understood as culturally relative. Obviously we don't want cultural
producers to be exploited, but at the same time you just can't say that
'working for free' by, say, contributing to a mailing list discussion or
creating a Tumblr is exploitative in the same way that competition-based
freelance platforms encourage.
We talked to the founders of a Nigerian freelancing platform last week,
and I asked them about this. I said that Western discourses tend to
focus on precarity, lack of unions, lack of sick/holiday pay etc and
asked whether this was an issue for Nigerian workers. They said it might
be in the future, but for now, workers are just desperate for money and
will take whatever work they can get as a matter of necessity.
Also, precarity is much more of an 'issue' for rich countries because
we're used to stability, but people in poor countries are used to
needing multiple revenue streams and being self-employed.
Thanks for Crowded Apocalypse....looks great.
Charlotte:
Reading through the IOCOSE interview has made me think about how our
project has shifted - at the Tate hack it was very much about
outsourcing the creative process (our group motto has become 'let it
go'!), and challenging the idea of the author, as IOCOSE touch on.
This was a fascinating and knotty approach, but as the project has
progressed, we've taken more control over the production process. It was
partly because we really wanted to understand the system of digital
labour, and to hear from specific voices about it so we could raise
awareness about a potential future of work coming to all of us. That
required us to run a pretty tight logistical ship and to take a bit more
control, so we moved away from the focus on outsourcing creativity for
quite pragmatic reasons.
I think I'm struggling with the 'but where's the art?' question in our
project, and can't quite decide 'what' it is, and whether this matters.
I'd love to know how you'd categorise the project…
Ruth:
I ask about the art, because you describe yourself as an artist. I think
it's true that you describe Glasshouse as an arts collective, that came
together at the launch event for The Space which is a digital arts
commissioning agency.
If I were to come straight to your Digital Labour project I might
describe it as a social research project that employs some engagement
techniques that are informed by participatory art.
What I'm interested to hear from you is about why it was important to
describe Glasshouse as an arts collective.
Charlotte:
We described ourselves as an art collective early on (we formed in June
2014) as that was loosely how we conceived of ourselves. Partly that was
a result of meeting at Hack the Space, and the focus of our work on
outsourcing creative activities.
Since then, the membership of the group has changed, and we've avoided
calling ourselves an art collective on www.workwewant.com, because we
(or at least I) see the project in a way that is similar to your
description. Although the importance of the category 'art' has fallen
away as we've been led by our 'findings' (to use a researchy term), the
engagement techniques you mention do come out of a knowledge of
participatory (and other) art practices, and it would be unusual to find
them in a straightforward social research project. The work will take a
physical form at the Web We Want festival, as well as taking an online
form on the Space website. In that respect, I'd say the work belongs to
a broad field of networked cultural production.
Ruth: The Netartizens project www.furtherfield.org/netartizens is
"exploring the role of the network in our individual and collective
practice as artists, scholars, educators, and citizens of the Net".
There has been considerable debate in response to the idea of the Net
(or platforms and communities of the web) as a place, and also to the
idea of citizenship, and questions of roles and responsibilities.
In your work so far have you encountered any practices, platforms or
infrastructures for digital labour that build (or that could be used) to
build community and solidarity, to defend and nurture shared interests
and values between labourers?
Charlotte:
This is such an important question for digital labourers, because the
nature of freelancing platforms makes it very hard to collectively organise.
When we spoke to Vili Lehdonvirta and Mark Graham from the Oxford
Internet Institute they gave us some great insights into this:
Traditionally, workers could withdraw labour in order to protest, but
with digital labour this is almost impossible because there is always
someone who will be willing to do the work if you don't. Geographical
distribution and global competition also contributes to the problem.
Whereas traditionally, workers in a factory might have all come from
very similar circumstances, digital labourers' circumstances can be
radically different, and not all need to make a living wage from the
work they do online.
Vili and Mark found that very few of the digital workers they talked to
were aware of processes of unionisation, but they said that there are
more attempts at collective organisation amongst 'commodified' workers
(doing micro-tasks) as opposed to the more highly skilled workers. There
are have been some attempts at this on Amazon Mechanical Turk
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/dec/03/amazon-mechanical-turk-workers-protest-jeff-bezos
There are also several organisations like the Precarious Workers
Brigade, http://precariousworkersbrigade.tumblr.com/ Freelancers Union
http://www.freelancersunion.org and Altgen www.altgen.org.uk who are
supporting workers to cooperate and support themselves.
Ruth:
That's brilliant, thanks.
I am very struck by your competition winner, Tricia's response to your
question about how freelance work affects her life. She starts by
describing the freedom that she enjoys as a freelancer in contrast to
her work as a teacher where 'curriculum and ministry standards' tell her
'what to be'.
She goes on to say 'Freelancing brings me joy and happiness. I am truly
happy when I am creating a piece of freelancing work that has me infused
into it. There is nothing more rewarding than pouring yourself into a
digital product and having your employers (or members of the public)
impressed with the final product. It definitely makes a person feel
successful. Since I have started freelancing, I have found my happiness
and my creative freedom. This has spilled out into my personal life as
well. I am a better teacher, wife and mother because I’m channelling my
true inner spirit and I’m happy again.'
http://www.workwewant.com/meet
And this resonates with my feelings about the kind of experience I have
of free artistic play, and collaboration in my favourite online spaces,
or in communal music making.
But on the shadow side is the unheard voice of those who don't win the
brief or the competition.
See this twitter exchange with artist Jennifer Chan who talks more and
more about the high levels of self exploitation required to make it as
an artist.
https://twitter.com/furtherfield/status/573506927419920384
Do you have any stats yet about the proportion of digital labour that
might be described as "creative labour". And I'm interested to know
about whether you have noticed any affects particular to creative
digital labourers in contrast with other forms of digital labour.
Charlotte:
This touches on several issues. Firstly, the question of the unheard
voices of those who didn't win the brief; In general digital labour
terms, running a competition as we did shone a light on one of the more
exploitative aspects of freelancing online - competition-based payment.
Employers put out a job, and get back completed work from dozens of
people, and only have to pay one of them for it. This takes the idea of
the pitch, which creative professionals are used to, to a new level. We
realised we were complicit in the system by running a competition, but
we also attempted to disrupt things by displaying all the submissions to
the public and inviting a vote for the winner. For artists, the
competition is also a familiar model - applying for prizes, competitions
and open submission exhibitions with very high application fees is
common practice, and most applicants are not selected. OP3NR3P0.NET is
offers a really positive counter to this prevalent model.
We don't have stats on the proportion of jobs which are creative, but it
might be possible to find out from the platforms' data, though this
would only tell us about creative vs non-creative jobs 'on the books'.
As mentioned above, online freelance work can be broken down in terms of
'commodified', highly unitised work and more skilled work such as
website design, graphic design, coding etc, which it is harder to
unitise. This kind of skilled work is creative but can still be
outsourced. Off the books though, there is a whole other realm of
affective labour which is not seen as 'work' - forms of online cultural
production from which value can be extracted in many ways by platforms
and companies.
Artists are perhaps subject both to relations of both affective labour
and the rhetoric of entrepreneurialism. This takes us back to Hack the
Space - is it exploitative to gather together 145 artists and
developers, make them work for 24 hours, and then 'reward' 30% of them?
I'm still torn on this, because obviously taking part confers a lot of
benefit for the participants, but the model comes out of something that
is potentially quite exploitative.
Ruth:
There is some controversy surrounding the proliferation of hack-days in
the arts. Here Constant Dullart discusses his open letter to the
organizers of the Art Hack Day at Transmediale ‘Afterglow’ 2014
.http://pastebin.com/f9g7CR75
His main complaint is that by forcing artistic processes into short
hyper-productive corporate processes we loose the opportunity to develop
more philosophical (and I would say critical) work.
What place would hack days have (if any) in your ideal future of the arts?
Charlotte:
Constant Dullart does a great job of articulating some of the problems
resulting from how the rhetoric of hacking has been subsumed by arts
organisations and is used to generate attention and surplus value. I can
of course see the value of 'not sleeping and making last minute work',
but I also think the hack format can be macho, competitive and
physically draining. It also promotes 'solutionism', which completely
stifles the notion of reflection, process-orientation and criticality.
I'm not sure hack days do have a place in my ideal future of the arts. I
have wondered about the idea of the Slow Hack, which would a form of
protest against the format itself, but in the spirit of the slow hack I
won't present it as a solution :)
Ruth
Thanks very much Charlotte! So much to chew on! Look forward to seeing
Work We Want at Southbank Centre again in May.
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