The Dallas Museum of Art Center for Creative Connection (C3) will host a participatory installation form Oct 1-Dec 31. The project includes a series of educational workshops, an audio tour, and an artist talk integrating critical study of the parallels in labor issues between the 19th and 21st centuries. Digital crowdsourcing will create a dialog asking participants to rethink their bodies as sites of labor. How we used to work that were based in the changes that the industrial revolution brought which created huge urban areas like New York, Chicago and Houston compared to the new and emerging job platforms of the 21st century will be highlighted. The rise of factories started true urbanization and today virtual platforms like Uber, Task Rabbit, and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk have in its way united the global workforce in a virtual space. Visit artist xtine burrough’s site. http://www.missconceptions.net
“Mediations on Digital Labor began with a hijacking of the Amazon.com Mechanical Turk website (Murk.com) for a critical, poetic, and alternative practice: Artist xtine burrough hired the Turkers to pause from physical labor, to share their thoughts on resting, and to chant “Om” for 10 seconds. Demonstrating the tension between play and labor, this collection of digital chants, compiled from a virtual job board, showcases the voices of disembodied strangers making a sound that can accompany one’s return to her body at a vibrational frequency found throughout the natural world. In the gallery participants are invited to work, rewriting in chalk on the floor of the space the various Turker thoughts on resting, and are awarded with one of the USB drives hanging from the wall. Each one contains a chant.” xtine Burrough
