In this interdisciplinary art project a group of artists explore the concept of work from a philosophical, political, and critical perspective through an open and collaborative work process including researchers and union activists.
Changing global work relations and digital labor are transforming the way we perform our identities and understand our life worlds. Crowdsourcing, microtasks, sharing economy, and an expanding class of temporary and flexible workers strengthen commodification of relations and create extreme forms of alienation. The shift away from employment to short term and independent contract work challenges the labor rights established during the last hundred years to keep class warfare at bay. However, at the same time, social media also strengthens community and enables labor activism on a global scale.
To develop an understanding of this ongoing transformation of what we know as “work”, we start with our own artistic practices and work relations, developing artistic research methodologies. Here we start with ideas about the reflective practitioner, researcher’s situatedness, and art as micro-publics or infrastructuring, to explore how the reflexive artistic work process can be enhanced and supported through collaboration, and how the idea of work can be developed through materialization and art performance. This work about work takes place in workshops, online, in public seminars, and foremost in artists’ practice, through artworks.