Mano Daniel Szollosi, Trimester 3, 2012
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FACTORY RESET THEAMTIC PROJECT w/ Florian Cramer, Trimester 3, 2012
Reading journal / blog of Factory Reset readings
LEISURE FACTORY project
Crowdsourced Precarity
The visual result of the Leisure factory project is a series of webcam portraits taken by workers / users of Amazons Mechanical Turk of themselves in their own working environment.
Who are the workers of the Mechanical Turk? What is the Mechanical Turk?
Please watch the explanatory video
special thanks to Aymeric Mansoux
Photos
- LEISURE FACTORY – project description
- 'You deserve a minute off' was the title of the simple task I offered on Amazon's Mechanical Turk platform.
- Mechanical Turk is an online marketplace for work. Any US resident can commission a small task for a small fee to digital workers from all around the world. A task can be digitalization, transcribing visual or audio data, translating, writing reviews or comments or solving 'captchas'.
- My job offer was as follows: 'Stand up. Do 1 minute of exercise. Make a snapshot of yourself using your webcam. Upload the image to any image sharing service. Paste the URL of your uploaded image below and get paid 0.50$'
- The visual result of was a series of webcam portraits taken by Amazon's Mechanical Turk workers of themselves in their own working environment. The current series consists almost a hundred photos.
- My initial observation was – prior the project idea was born – since factories are becoming more and more automatized and robotised less and less human labour is in need in the factories. Literally factories producing unemployment. This phenomena amazed me I decided to dedicate a project for it.
- I faced the problem: how will I transform this observation into an artistic project? It is a short, one line statement easily expressible by words. If this observation itself is so simple: is it worthy to deal with? My instinct told me yes.
- For a long time I was just struggling – I could not come up with a solution.
- I researched the topic and my research (and tutorial with Phd Aymeric Mansoux) led me to my final tool / platform that could carry all the theories I dealt with previously and turn it into a stable realizable art project.
- After got to know about the platform I signed up as worker myself. I experienced the true exploitation and the boring almost robotic, monotone tasks. And I made almost no money at all, at least an amount that has almost zero real value in Western-Europe. But not in some other places.
- I could not almost believe that there are hundreds and thousand of people working using this platform.
- I was initially interested and curious to find out who are they: to see these working people. So one of the few rules established: 'your face has to appear on the photo'.
- To offer a job on Mechanical Turk platform is almost as easy as updating your status or edit a wiki page.
- The body of the offer was simple, pure and clearly understandable but the same time specific: use your webcam. This way I could achieve a secondary content: their 'working' environment which is in the case of these workers their own home sometimes even their own bedroom.
- The last decision I had to make to define the amount of money I will give away after each completed task – meaning receiving a link of a photo that satisfies the criteria. After a short research on the general amount of payment I decided to pay half a dollar for each photo – an amount that attracts these workers immediately. For them half a dollar is a lot of money for such a task that is easy and quick to complete – and for me this image collection worth a lot more. With some aim of luck this project of mine could be successful.
- This is why is also debatable whether my behaviour – as the artist – is generous whether exploiting – I admit this coin has also two sides: I believe it raises the importance of this particular project.