LOGISTICS WORKWEL
Chasing Out Noise
Workwelt Logistics explores the volatile relationship between neoliberalism, automation technologies and the natural labour systems that they appropriate. The project seeks to amplify the fundamental qualities of swarming and showcase how it manifests through material voicings, mechanical agency and historical legacies within contemporary e-commerce fulfilment centre workplaces. Through using the motif of the industrious ant swarm, robotics, field recordings, various AV components, construction materials and media-archaeological aesthetics the project magnifies an archaic labour spectacle that has been revived through artificial and machinic form and attempts to extract and embellish its presence and worldliness
“Bezeichne ich nun samtliche mich umgebenden subjektiven Wirk-lichkeiten als Umwelt, so wirdsich Schritt fur Schritt zeigen lassen, worin diese beiden Welten sich widersprechen ... Am besten wird man immer von einem einzelnen Gegenstand ausgehen und ihn in... verschiedenen umwelten aufsuchen, um einem indruck zu gewinnen, wie er sich in hunderterlei farben und formen kleidet und balt zu diesem bald zu janem umweltding wird.”
“If I now designate all the subjective realities surrounding me as environment, it will be possible to show step by step where these two worlds contradict each other... It is always best to start with a single object and look for it in... different environments, to get an impression of how it dresses in hundreds of colors and shapes and how it soon becomes an environmental thing.”
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Jakob von Uexküll, Theoretische Biologie (Berlin: Verlag von Julius Springer, 1928), 228.
Wirkwelt
Workwelt Logistics intends to incite speculation of a fictional fulfilment centre that utilises swarm technologies and automation mechanics but engages in labour that is not at all directed towards generating capital. The project reconsiders the utilitarian function of automation technologies through scheming an abstract story, a fabricated history, about cathartic emancipation of an authorial swarmic voice from a neoliberal worksite.
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These biomimetic machines have been designed to forage, rest and communicate based on social insect swarming behaviour, specially the Eciton burchellii army ant. They perform nomadic (scanning, burrowing, foraging) and stationary (stretching, resting their motors, relaying information) shiftwork at 60,000 millesecond intervals. Whilst machinic labour that appropriates organisational systems from natural world’ swarms has seen steady investment from logistics and e-commerce corporations in the 21st century, the robots occupying this site labour only to satiate their own needsfamiliarising themselves with their new mechanical bodies and cold, tag-ridden environment, twitching, spinning and communicating industriously but to generate a cacophony of noise.
For this fictional fulfiment centre, human consumers and human industrialists have been removed from the equation. We are left with their residual presence, the Workwelt Logistics corporation. However, this corporation is no longer concerned with fiscal revenue. The exhibition envisions swarmic labourers that have taken it upon themselves to blast through the ceiling of noise parameters that were established in the company’s formative years when human CEO figures sat in the director’s chair. Instead of shifting tangible inventory, shelves or crates, they shift their own body (individual and collective). Hooked up to contact microphones that amplify their mechanical functioning, this stethoscopic set-up operates to project the “anatomy” of swarming to a jarring scale. Unencumbered by the grips of a neoliberal business model, these workers labour to writhe in the excess of their toil. Simultaneously sprawled and chaotic yet stationed and operational, this is a worksite that has broken from its constrictive chains and is making use of the tools that would otherwise be employed to freight inventory and perform typical logistics tasks.
(in ethology) The effector world or motor-sphere behaviour actioned by an organism based on its understanding of its environment, its umweltLorem ipsum Lorem ipsum
Surrounding the workers, artefacts and diagrams are displayed that allude to the origins, developments and present-day operations of the corporation: Archival footage of the site dating back to the company’s formative years, documenting the emergence of neoliberal swarming. Concrete rubble excavatations that piece together an unsure history of a aeureka moment when swarmic data was harvested from the natural world, its introduction to the neoliberal business model and their subsequent moment of hybridity. An educational decal that outlines the Workwelt system’ flow of electrical current, warehouse inventory tags, robotic toiling and sonic output. Acrylic schematics that detail the trajectories of natural world resources, labouring bodies and eventual output signals.
This is a symbiosis that is fraught with harmonies and hostilities due to the paradoxical politics of swarming. However, if there is common ground between the corporation and the social insect, it lies in the tensions of information/noise, host/parasite, luxury/necessity and difference/repetition that are necessitated by swarming and neoliberalism as frameworks for upwards mobility and growth. Swarming as an action is therefore transient and gives way to tensions that must circulate if the system is to be kept alive.
Workwelt Logistics is an aristic project by Samuel Beilby. It was created alongside a Master of Fine Art (Research) thesis entitled “Swarmic Trajectories: Mapping the Symbiosis of Social Insects and Biomimetic Automation at Fulfilment Centre Worksites” (2022).
Special thanks to...
MFA supervisors Dr. Vladimir Todorovic and Dr. Ionat Zurr for their guidance, support and patience, Andrew Christie, Guy Eddington, Dave Marie, and Ollie Anderson for workshop assistance and technical know-how, Reegan Jackson for his install help, Mohamed Gaber for his robotics knowledge and PCB designs
This exhibition and accomapanying thesis were produced on unceded Whadjuk Noongar boodja. Samuel Beilby pays his respects to Elders past and present, and acknowledges their continuing sovereignty, culture and law.