'Self-sufficient Nodes' by EKP Award Winner Ananya Panda

As part of: Be the Future of Something Else | Publication St. Joost School of Art & Design & Masters Institute of Visuals Cultures

Self-sufficient Nodes is an examination of the human labor that feeds into machine ‘intelligence’ in the form of the ghost-work of metadata tagging, data set curation, content moderation etc. The artwork moves between compliance with, and critique of a system that renders the bodies, senses, and cognition of diverse workers into computational resources. The re-enactment of digitally mediated wage labor relations on crowdsourcing platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk is used as a strategy to think through this technology. Veering between abstraction and representation, the video installation weaves together the worlds of workers dispersed in the Cloud through a collection of screenshots, shared Google Docs, Excel sheets, footage, digital and physical artefacts. This exploration chronicles the lived realities of the working crowd while asking what power its members hold beyond their designated role as nodes in a global information network, potentially creating a provocation for the viewers, along with an invitation to become entangled in this complex web.

Ananya Panda is a visual artist interested in pattern as a device to represent and communicate information, tracing the notion from perceptual to social realms. Ananya’s practice revolves around collecting and reconfiguring materials, forms, gestures and stories across space and time to forge new constellations of meaning. Through story telling, she hopes to produce fixed and moving images that help access worlds othered in the contemporary configuration of Platform capitalism.

Ananya’s work is a considered and careful examination of the work of Mechanical Turk workers. She incorporates beading into the work and the visual of this beadwork becomes echoed in the pixelated images presented on the screen. While Ananya’s thesis was precise and eloquent in its description of care for and immersion into the digital underclass of the Turker community she carried out, in the artwork Ananya allows herself to fuzz the edges, make it blurry. She allows an ironic sense of humour to emerge, with the clock and the ‘hustle’ neon sign. Ananya’s work resonates with the beauty and horror of our contemporary digital lives. — Dr. Michelle Kazprzak, Angelique Spaninks

(external experts)