Immaterial Labour Isn’t Working is a series of talks, workshops, texts and online contributions from key voices – artists, activists, technologists and writers – to examine how digital technology is changing our political selves.
Everything has changed. A technological revolution and an economic crisis have combined to reshape our world. Today, we live, work and play online, and yet we are often still stuck in ways of thinking that belong to an offline world.
Over 40 years information technology has transformed our working patterns. Today, our productive capabilities are harnessed in all our waking hours as the boundaries between production and consumption transform into a pixelated blur. The way we produce, disseminate and consume culture is now almost totally mediated by the online space; but more than this, there’s also an increasingly fluid relation between “creative industries” and the working practices being imposed upon other workers. The aesthetic and technical structures of online space are becoming the prism through which we visualise and conceptualise our everyday lives, yet technological developments in the workplace are being structured for the benefit of our employers rather than us workers.
How does living online affect our mental health? Are we working too much? Is the boundary between work and play too porous? How does political organising happen when we never meet our colleagues? What does culture look like when the tools to make and broadcast exist on every laptop?
The first project to be presented at Auto Italia’s new King’s Cross space, ILIW13 will be physically situated within this area of industrial and social transformation, occupying an uncertain landscape now claimed as site of cultural production.
Immaterial Labour Isn’t Working is a project by Auto Italia South East in collaboration with Huw Lemmey.
Confirmed contributors include: Alex Andrews, Hannah Black, James Bridle, Joanna Figiel & Stevphen Shukaitis (Metropolitan Factory), Mark Fisher, Alex Hern, Dougald Hine, Dave King (Luddites), Metahaven, Novara Media, Michael Oswell, David Rudnick, Jay Springett, Kieran Startup Alex Vasudevan, Ben Vickers, Josefine Wikström and Will Wiles with more to be announced.