Art from Outside the Googleplex:
An Interview with Andrew Norman Wilson∗
Louis Doulas
May 14, 2012
Through webinars, installations, power points, performances, audio meditations,
and videos, Andrew Norman Wilson’s interventions into the brands and infrastructures
of Silicon Valley and other tech corporations question the role of labor, power, and
capital; instigations, integral to understanding the movement of information economies
in the global marketplace, as well as the power relations that emerge from within them.
ScanOps, titled after the internal department for Google’s onsite book scanning
contractors, is Wilson’s latest series of works that reveal the software distortions and
hands of ScanOps employees found in the photographic scanning site.
LD: Workers Leaving the Googleplex, responded to two versions of the film Workers
Leaving the Factory: one by Harun Farocki and the other, the original, by the Lumire
brothers. The premise of your own video was to make a work that captured the shift
in labor from the industrial proletariat into the informational proletariat. The yellow
badge workers were presented in parallel to Lumires’ workers and have become the
focal point of another series of works, ScanOps. Could you first talk about the hierarchies that existed at Google, specifically the perks, benefits, opportunities, or lack
thereof that existed between various color badges?
ANW: Using Workers Leaving the Googleplex as an illustration of these hierarchies,
white, red, and green badge workers on the left side of the image are seen passing
by, entering, and exiting a variety of buildings at the Googleplex. Some of them ride
the Google loaner bikes, some of them enter a luxury limo shuttle headed towards
San Francisco. Some of them may be leaving work, some may be walking to another
building to pick up their laundry or exercise in one of the gyms, some may even be
just arriving at the Google campus to eat a free meal from one of Google’s 20 gourmet
cafes after a day of working at home. The yellow badge workers on the right side of
the image are seen leaving the one building they are allowed access to. Much like the
workers in the Lumire film, the yellow badge workers are leaving at the same time
because their superiors have asked them to. But their synchronized departure is not
especially arranged for a camera. They are leaving at 2:15 pm, like they do every day.
The separation and exclusion of the yellow badge class creates difference in movement.
Their movement is much closer to the industrial proletariat of the prior two films (by
∗ This
is a revised PDF version of an article published on Rhizome.org, May 14, 2012.
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Lumire and Farocki) than the kinetic elite of the white, red, and green badged workers
sharing the screen.
Representing movement was the primary goal of the Lumire film, and I was interested in doing the same with the Googleplex video. Yet, as Farocki points out in his
film, we have come to recognize that moving images not only represent movement, but
can also grasp for concepts. And so Workers Leaving the Googleplex suggests both
transformations and continuities from where Farocki and Lumire had left us, grasping
for connections in social/aesthetic systems.
LD: Could you extrapolate a bit more on these notions of movement?
ANW: In all three works, what we see are work forces in motion, organized simultaneously by the work structure (a temporal synchronization), the factory gates (a spatial
grouping), and the filmmakers’ choreography of this spatio-temporal relationship. In
the Googleplex video, we are presented with a class-based system of access (or lack
thereof) that can script different flows of movement. Google allows a lot of room for
its white, red, and green badge workers to engage in free play; however, movement and
action that exceeds the boundaries of that scripting and poses a threat to the company,
such as my activity around the exterior of the yellow badges building, can set Google
Security and Google Legal into specified movements around that atypical behavior.
Movement entails an object and its change in position with respect to time. As we
transition from the dominance of analog media such as film and books to digital media
such as video and digitized books, the newer forms are still wholly inseparable from
the material world. There are voltages in electronic circuits, server farms, upgraded
tech for every new product cycle, and a persistent necessity for repetitive, manual labor
despite technological progress and the increasing prominence of cultural and informational labor.
The video also presents us with the expansive aesthetic distributive system that it
participates in as a viral video. It includes a spatial montage of multiple images - like
the ads, related content, icons, additional windows and tabs, etc. that compose a screen
during the viewing of a video online. The colored borders in the video are an information visualization of worker ratios within the respective images. Even the use of color
HD video (with sound) is conceptually important in relation to Lumires’ film. Both
works are emblematic of their particular historical moments, and both now circulate
through contemporary distribution networks.
LD: The digitalization of the Lumire film is actually a nice transition into understanding ScanOps-which attempts to document the manual labor permeating under technological progress. How were you able to obtain these scans?
ANW: I have been quietly collecting anomalies from Google Books for a couple years
now. It’s another way of getting closer to those people I worked with, while of course
still remaining out of touch with them. Krissy Wilson’s blog The Art of Google Books
has made my searching much easier. Her criteria allows for a much more broad collection of images than what I’m after, and I’m more interested in printing the images than
posting my finds online. I prefer to call what I’m collecting photographs as opposed
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to scans. Mass market books can be sliced open and fed into scanners, but the books
I’m looking at come from library collections and need to be photographed from above.
Therefore we occasionally see the backsides of workers hands. The project is called
ScanOps because that is (or was) the internal department name for Google’s onsite
book scanning contractors.
The photographs that I chose are Google Books images in which software distortions, the imaging site, and the hands of ScanOps employees are visible. They’re both
indexical, and medium-specific. Their processes, digital manipulations, and material
supports are folded within them. Because of the speed and volume with which Google
is executing the Books project, they can’t possibly identify and correct all of the disturbances in what is supposed to be a seamless interface. Removed “for me” The accidents
then complicate the categorizations of “immaterial” and “informational” labor in the
Information Technology sector.
I choose photographs that have formal similarities to contemporary photography
that emphasizes the materiality of the photographic support, such as work by Walead
Beshty and Elad Lassry. By positioning ScanOps in relation to theirs, they can “read”
as photographs, and extend in relationships to painting and sculpture through the discourses surrounding those artist’s work. And then there’s the fact that they’re photographs of books. As Karen Barad puts it
That which is excluded in the enactment of knowledge-discourse-power
practices plays a constitutive role in the production of phenomena – exclusions matter both to bodies that come to matter and those excluded from
mattering.
The fingers and software distortions that obscure the “pure information” in the
books complicate Google’s technocratic proposals for a utopia of universally accessible knowledge. What emerges is an argument for the inseparability of matter and
meaning, fusing a discussion of knowledge with ontological, ethical, and aesthetic issues.
LD: And Sergey Brin and Larry Page initially got in trouble for attempting the project,
right?
ANW: Yes, because the complete copying of an entire book violates copyright, the
photographers have been faced with lawsuits from the Authors Guild, the Association
of American Publishers, and more. The settlement they all came to was rejected in
court last year, but they’re scheduled to go to court again soon. And that’s just in the
US, there’s much more resistance in certain European countries.
LD: I’m sure, as most of the texts (at least the ones featured throughout your series)
originate from western spheres. But, the visibility of the hand in each of the photographs also signifies something else here too: the social conditions of the workers,
relating back to the two films, especially the ‘movement’ of the Lumires’ workers.
ANW: Someone has to turn a page and press a button. The workers compose part of
the photographic apparatus, which, conceived in a broad sense includes not only the
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machinery, but the social systems within which photography operates. The anonymous
workers, electrons, Sergey and Larry, the pink finger condoms, infrared cameras, the
auto-correction software, the ink on my rag paper prints, me, the capital required to
fund the project - we’re all in it. It’s not a dematerialized image world.
LD: Right, the worker’s presence reaffirms, or rather reasserts the materiality of information production. You’ve mentioned that Google is actually a factory, and with this
in mind, your work perhaps isn’t rendered so ambivalently, so I’m curious to hear your
positions in regards to this type of information economy, and Google itself.
ANW: Everyone who uses the free Google perks - gmail, cloud-storage, Google Books,
Blogger, YouTube - becomes a knowledge worker for the company. We’re performing
freestyle data entry. Where knowledge is perceived as a public good, Google gathers
its income from the exchange of information and knowledge, creating additional value
in this process. Google, as we know it and use it, is a factory.
A few years ago the company afforded me free Naked Juice every day, Metronaps
and the ability to have a conversation with Obama. You and I, Louis, are on g-chat now
and fact checking through Google search. All art and artistic discourse participates in
the market economy. This isn’t to say that art either supports or rejects the notion of a
market transaction, or that art can’t affect social change. Just that there’s no outside.
Art’s radical potential is in its transparency. It has come to reject the form/content
divide, whereas other disciplines have not been able to do so. The discourse of art is
capable of becoming continuous with the world it sets out to describe, fully embracing
its own material condition. Google, however, is a multinational corporation, and it values both the simplicity of its products and the privacy of its internal functions. There’s
not much room for the consideration of things like the monetization of thought. It’s a
company.
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