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While more and more capacities that we thought of as human-specific are applicable to machines, how can we rethink work that has long been considered part of human characteristics? What is work in the globalized digital age? On the one hand, a growing algorithmic Taylorism—the extreme division of labour among click workers—and on the other hand, a persistent mechanical illusion—many tasks thought to be performed by computers are in fact performed by human beings, in a more or less hidden way. In an era of algorithmic management, what about performance measurement and worker optimization tools? What about the end of wage labour as the dominant structure for work? And, in what is now called the « attention economy », it is not only workers who work: any online activity is likely to add to the capital accumulation of Internet giants through its commodification. All data is monetisable. Every Internet user is profitable. Being online = working?
Algotaylorism brings together artists who work at the human-machine junction point and have taken this interaction as a research subject and as a production tool. Working unwittingly; having an algorithm as a boss; acting as an artificial intelligence and envisioning a society not work-centred: so are the different chapters of the exhibition. For its purpose, human productions and performances will be coupled with custom software in the form of an art delivery order application, an ecological mining process of a Marxist-inspired cryptocurrency and conversational robots with disturbing speech.
