learning from machine learning

Research

Video, text, images

2018 – ongoing

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An artistic research into creative thinking as a relation between requirement and latitude in the context of both production and artificial intelligence, as well as the future of work itself.

By tasking an international workforce with unexpected and playful interventions, the project aims to make use of the new-found possibilities of a worldwide network, spanning different cultures and linking different people through technology. A form of exchange in which the social is implemented as part of the job description. In this equation, money works as a facilitator to "buy time" for the involved, perhaps to consider things like work, art and community.
When funding a group of people to hand in photographic or video material, the danger of exploitation has to be considered. Therefor, involved people were asked not to show their faces or anything that could turn against them, as the results will be exhibited. Further, the aim was to pay fair and at least above standard wages. This was hard to ensure as the workers stem from all kinds of places and use more or less time to complete a task. Judging from the fact that all tasks were picked up immediately and from conversations with some of the people, the payment was (sadly) even among the highest on the platform.
 

The link to A.I. is given due to the use of mturk.com, an Amazon-run website with the underlying idea to fake computing work by human labour, essentially reducing programming costs by outsourcing software tasks. The URL itself is a reference to the mechanical turk („Schachtürke“) by the hungarian inventor Wolfgang von Kempelen, a chess-playing fake robot anno 1769. In the words of Amazon, anyone can access their golbal, 24/7 on-demand workforce to offer “Human Intelligence Tasks", which are for the most part, very mondane tasks.

So far, tasks in the frame of this research required people to "select favourable Chip designs", "guess chess", "roll a plate", "show the sky from the view of your window" and things like that. Some results of the first project stage, processed by roughly 40 paid workers, were put together in a short video for the exhibition AESTHETICS OF CHANGE at the Museum für Angewandte Kunst in Vienna. The exhibition tackled utopian questions about the future of learning and working at Universities.

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