Gig Faces, Gig Spaces
An art installation revealing the hidden faces and spaces of the "gig economy."
Gig Faces, Gig Spaces is an installation of people at work. They are not “at work” in the traditional sense. They are at home, performing “Human Intelligence Tasks” (HITs) on the crowdsourcing labor site Amazon Mechanical Turk. “MTurk" connects laborers around the world with requesters looking for data entry, image tagging, filling out surveys, and other menial tasks simple enough for humans, but challenging for computers to do accurately. (This includes the English-Korean translation of this text you are reading).
For USD1.00, I asked workers to video themselves completing mTurk tasks. The length of the video equals the amount of time it takes to perform USD1.00 worth of tasks for others, sometimes taking as long as fifteen minutes. My task request essentially doubles the value of the mostly mindless tasks they perform.
We can’t see the tasks they are performing, but we see the faces and spaces of new labor: domestic settings all around the world, with workers’ faces locked in the view, eyes darting around their screens as they earn pennies for mostly mindless tasks.
Commissioned by and installed at the 2017 Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism
Videos of gig workers at work endlessly play on screens. After they have worked enough to earn US$1.00, the screen flips to another worker somewhere else in the world earning money in the "gig economy." The digital counter (left) tallies the total US$1.00 sessions to show a running total of money earned by gig workers throughout the exhibition.
While the digital counter (left) tallies the total money earned by the gig workers in the exhibition, a continuous video loop shows the spaces—the home offices, living rooms, bedrooms—where gig workers earn their meager wages.
Amazon Mechanical Turk (mTurk) homepage. Workers (left) perform small, menial tasks for Requesters (right) that are too simple for wage employees but too complicated to automate with computers. Data entry, image labeling, and taking surveys are some of the examples of "Human Intelligence Tasks" (HITs) on offer for mere pennies per HIT.