Labour Under Surveillance reconceptualises digitally mediated service environments as fields in which bodies, visibility, and temporality are co-produced through circuits of capture and control. By attending to the smallest gestures and operational adjustments that constitute labour under continuous monitoring, the project reframes research as a topological practice that maps how power inhabits bodies, rhythms, and infrastructures, proposing non-hierarchical modes of documentation and circulation through counter-archives, iterative cuts, and dispositive installation.
Labour Under Surveillance extends a processual field inquiry developed through years of work within monitored service environments, returning to one such configuration. The research approaches these workplaces topologically, as relational fields in which the worker’s body is reorganised as interface, node, and image within circuits of visibility and feedback. While reproduction is transformed through the installation of self-monitoring and anticipatory adjustment, dynamics that are not historically new, digitally mediated service environments recombine these logics into continuous operational circuits in which bodies are reorganised as interfaces within distributed infrastructures of capture. Online casino studios are approached as paradigmatic articulations of these conditions.
If the body becomes a live endpoint, it is treated here as both site and sensor, registering how something is built up, something artificial, posed, procedural. Parsing the site’s architecture, the work remains continuous, while the materials produced appear as cuts in an ongoing process.
With multiple entry points and the intention to grow sideways, the inquiry develops rhizomatically. Under these conditions intersubjectivity becomes material together with the body. Fragments and registers accumulate over time without pre-imposed conditions or predictive sequencing. In turn, strategies condense into cumulative nodes, writing functions as extraction, and the resulting material assumes the form of an archival assemblage gathering reflections, field notes, reports, integrations of multiple inputs, histories, and machines. Another cut takes the form of a video installation in which cameras operate as analytical devices, translating vision into labour and images into operational diagrams.
Within the spectacular frame of the casino, micrological attention is directed toward a constellation of processes including live evaluations, measurements of hand speed, scripts, protocols, algorithms, uniforms, and affects, while diagrammatically registering the penetrating gaze of permanent surveillance alongside the flickering ordinarity of captured time.
Grantee
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Miruna |
Dates and places
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2026, between Zurich and Bucharest |