A. Cayer, D. Cuff. "UNFIT: Los Angeles and the Glass Box" in Thresholds: Workspace 44, (MIT 2016). (original) (raw)
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The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media, 2013
and Keywords This article appears in the Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media edited by Carol Vernallis, Amy Herzog, and John Richardson. This article discusses recent experimental nonfiction films about workers and industry. Since the cinema's 1995 centenary, a growing number of films have been responding to the state of labor in the contemporary economy, in which industrial manufacturing has been largely replaced by global finance capital. The article analyzes four examples: Workers Leaving the Factory (Dubai) (Ben Russell, 2008), Exit (Sharon Lockhart, 2008), Foreign Parts (Véréna Paravel and J. P. Sniadecki, 2010), and The Unstable Object (Daniel Eisenberg, 2011). Mobilizing a style we might call "conceptual realism," these films explore themes of labor in the face of ongoing crises in global capitalism. Utilizing a digitally informed observational aesthetic shaped by long takes and stationary camerawork, this paradoxical stylistic clarity works not in the service of establishing objectivity or a stable truth, but in the spirit of bearing witness to the innumerable experiences of contemporary labor that lie beyond recognition.
Workshop: Perspectives on Uses and Users in the History of Office Buildings, 2023
Introduced to the market in 1967, Herman Miller’s Action Office II system promised to revolutionize the office furniture and office architecture industries by adding humanity, flexibility, and integrating sophisticated technology into spaces previously ignored by architects and designers. Such optimism, however, was not to last long. Twenty-five years after the system’s launch, Action Office was widely understood as the progenitor of the dreaded, dreary, uniform, and inflexible cubicle style of office interior. How can this discontinuity between the well-meaning intention of Action Office and the negative spatial realities the system eventually brought about be understood? To date, the literature has suggested that the transformation of Action Office into the cubicle occurred after the system’s widespread adoption; that the cubicle’s most hated features came about as the result of individual bad actors (corporations and managers), and fault in this process lies outside of Herman Miller’s walls. This paper proposes an alternative understanding of the evolution of Action Office. Through mobilization of Marxist Labor process theory and an interrogation of labor relations within Herman Miller itself, this paper suggests that the cubicleization of Action Office can be understood as a natural progression of understanding of labor within Herman Miller, within the company’s understandings of and attitudes toward work, labor processes, and labor relations. Examining Herman Miller’s corporate ethos toward labor and work through archival research and examination of the company’s Scanlon (profit-sharing) plan, the paper outlines the idealistic and simplistic attitudes taken toward labor at the company, mapping these attitudes and understandings onto the physical reality of the office furniture systems the company designed. Broadly, this paper argues that office spaces, places designed explicitly around work tasks, cannot be understood without simultaneous exploration of work and labor – both in terms of the particular corporate conceptions of labor and of the reality of work within and under capitalism.
(I'm)Material Labor in the Digital Age
2009
One must be bold enough to ask if mental labor means the millions upon millions of workers who still occupy factory positions or are currently migrating to these positions. Does the much-theorized techno-communicative "countermobilization" strategy for global resistance also include the world's homeless or half-billion illiterates?4 Classical Marxism informs these important questions. Yet as devastating the implications one must at the same time recognize the gravity and reality of transformation, including one recent estimation that "[f]inancial markets trade more in a month than the entire annual global gross domestic product" (Martin). To be sure, late capitalism's "regime of investment" does not include portfolios from the majority of the world's working class poor, but it does account for the increasing concentration of the world's wealth.
Thresholds 44: Workspace, ed. Nisa Ari and Christianna Bonin. Cambridge, MA: MIT SA+P Press, 2016.
Thresholds, 2016
thresholds 44: Workspace mines how the meanings of and locations for work have been historically and culturally defined, how work transposes earlier notions of labor and craft production, and how the work of artists, writers, architects, designers, and urban planners – alongside managers, psychologists, political leaders, and employees themselves – have been integral in construing the physical and mental conditions of work, rest, and play. Spanning the fields of art and architectural history and practice, urban planning, science, technology, economic history, sociology, medical history, and creative writing, the contributions to thresholds 44: Workspace attend in turn to the individuals, institutions, or objects that activate workspaces in surprising or previously unwritten ways. The contributions depend on acts of spatial revelation or suppression, bringing to light connections between work, worker, and workspace otherwise seen as separate, quiescent, or clandestine.
Ethnography, 2022
In this article, I draw upon 20 months of participant observation to compare the labor processes of routine, office staff in the popular music and digital content industries in the U.S. In both cases, workers play a game of disappearing, pursuing immersive experiences in their efforts to be more productive. These pleasurably immersive experiences vis-à-vis technology described by informants bear a similarity to aesthetic experiences typically associated with art objects. Comparing how workers describe their aesthetic experiences, I show how the materiality of technology as well as management mediate workers' immersion. In doing so, this article extends theories of control over work by highlighting the importance of work's affective and aesthetic dimensions while also making an empirical contribution by examining the culture industries' often overlooked, routine workers in conventional and platformized contexts.
Critical Possibilities| Critical Absences: devices, machines and other hybrid associations
TRANS-IN-CORPORADOS: CONSTRUINDO REDES PARA A INTERNACIONALIZAÇÃO DA PESQUISA EM DANÇA, 2017
This article explores the potential of absence, invisibility and disappearance as fundamental ideas for choreography in the present time. Capitalism is a main provider of "experiences" making performativity a central locus of productivity. Our relation with objects is defining new relations that moved away from our role of object users. As performance becomes a core feature of capitalism could a refusal to perform or a withdrawal provide a critical stance on the way we live today? Such refusal encapsulates a radical aspect in a time where performance seems to cooperate with capitalism. To leave the stage to an "object performer" is to engage with other meanings and worlds that might translate our present hybrid world characterized by a growing dependence of the human body and technology.
Automated Labor: The 'New Aesthetic' and Immaterial Physicality
Ctheory, 2013
This essay considers Karl Marx short essay ‘The Fragment on Machines’ and its relationship to digital automation. The ‘new aesthetic’ described by James Bridle is a typical example of this new, automated labor beginning to impact the physical world and provides a reference point for the examination of ‘The Fragment on Machines’: Marx divided labor into three categories (means, material and living labor) that is in the process of being reorganized by digital automated systems (in both immaterial labor and physical production forms). This reorganization forces an underlying paradox in capitalism into focus, foregrounding the mismatch between a capitalist productive system and the consumer society required to maintain that system, a paradox that emerges precisely because exchange value emerges from the relationship between one commodity and another—from the exchange of a commodity for the acquisition of another: human labor is the underlying commodity required by this entire system, a commodity rendered obsolete by digital automation; the ‘new aesthetic’ provides physical examples of this transition-in-progress.
Humanizing the Machines: Counterculture Art and Ambivalence Toward Technology
I am standing in the "Conference Room." Under my feet is a layer of crushed grey rock peppered with cigarette butts, pull-tabs from cans of beer and tufts of moss; a few wintery leaves scuttle by and drift into the walls of the "room." Walls rise up around me on all four sides, and a ceiling of dark nimbostratus clouds is 10,000 feet above that. To my left is a massive bank of wire-mesh windows with massive spider-web cracks which lace through one other. I think it looks like a mouth with punched out teeth. The windows are bordered with fragile-looking shards of rust that line the panes like so many mushroom gills on a decomposing log. To my right is a stark wall of concrete blocks bisected by asbestos-wrapped pipes and crowned with an aluminum gutter hanging by a few rusted screws. In front of me is a rickety-looking wooden fence. Two fences actually; a wooden one and a wire-mesh one, each one is supplementing the other's precarious construction-a few beams of light cut through the latticework and spill onto the cold stones under my feet. I can see part of Rochester's skyline off in the distance (the shop is not too far from downtown). Redolent in my nose is the heavy smell of pork skin from the BBQ joint across the street, the woozy haze of nicotine drifts on my lips from the cigarette that I toss into the stones. It is lost with the others. I work my way past the rusted folding chairs and the splinter-engorged picnic table, which presumably serves as the "Conference Table," and step over the pipes and tubes that run parallel to the surrounding walls. Cinder blocks prop up a few of the chairs, and a couple random ones are scattered about on the stones. There are bits of graffiti on the walls along with stickers. Many of the stickers advertise the shop's multiple logos, they are ubiquitous on the pipes, the windows, the chairs, the back side of the door… they are daring bits of art, enduring the weather and cold and snow that falls here for at least five months out of the year. My boots crunch on the stones as I gingerly avoid the pieces of glass littered among them and I make my way toward the door that goes back inside the shop. I briskly rub my hands together to try and warm them up; I grab onto the door handle (a worn down sticker-its face peeling, its luster lost-is on the handle) and I open the door. Stepping down at least two feet, I enter back into the office, the brain, and the central hub of Hide the Bodies. My hands start to warm up as soon as I am back inside. The thick smell of pork is replaced by the industrial scents of Plastisol Ink, acetone, and printer toner.