A Sketch for a Personal Error

The piece takes a pseudo-documentary form by creating a fictional persona who's work equipment is a computer. We are presented with the metadata of her hand movements on the screen during one week, represented as a graph. We encounter her for a fraction of a minute as she stops in the video frame. The videos focus solely on her hand resting on the side of her body, the body part actively involved in her work. In the first video, we see her in a moment of an attempt at relaxation, indulging her leisure time and the natural landscape, while her treacherous twitching finger reveals this moment as antithetical to her daily routine. In the second video, standing at the traffic light, the rhythmical sound of the traffic lights points to the technology as the environment in which she resides, where time and movement are measured, organised, valued and traded.

A twitching finger, we can safely assume has clicked away around 8000 times that day — a worker's single movement has become minuscule, but its numbers had increased. In addition to the body transformed in contact with the machine, the third element introduces the language of body maintenance used to counter, or facilitate that transformation. The piece is an exercise in exploration of the consequences of rationality, as it is enacted on the body of the worker. It aims to locate such consequences, as the Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI), in the underlying logic of, rather then malfunctioning, of optimisation. Which is to say that “Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technical progress”.

Details

technical info: installation, 2 x video with sound, digital print
dimensions: variable
exhibition views: Degrees of Freedom: Human, Robot And The Medium of Automation, Designhuis, Eindhoven 2017