Aymeric Tutorials I

Pre-Notes

Now

Over the coming week, I am going to shoot a series of short films as described here, which I aim to have available for the following meeting. Each film illustrates one step on an assembly line, although viewed in isolation the product being produced may not be clear to the viewer.

The film series is intended to illustrate how complicity and obedience is enabled through a greater division of labour. By doing this, the labourer's role in the production process is reduced to a highly specialised repetitive task, resulting in the abstraction - and sometimes anonymity - of the end-product.

These ideas come out of research and informal practical experiments undertaken during the first trimester about collaborative production systems (Yet Another Collaborative Editor / Constant Earthquake / Another Theory of Play and Fantasy). Do the labourers on an assembly line operate on a flat hierarchy model? Does the institution of the factory exploit this model as a means of enabling obedience and complicity in a production process?

Next

The above ideas illustrate control and collaborative production in a disciplinary society, where the symbol of power is visible but unverifiable. I would like to continue to explore how the same themes manifest in a control society, where power is ingrained into a production process through observational/automative technologies. Particularly, I would like to explore how a computer can occupy two roles as an agent in a networked production system: firstly, as a passive agent whereby it merely distributes incoming information directly to other agents in the system; and secondly, as an active agent, whereby it analyses and 'makes decisions' based on incoming information, and passes this as an output to the network.