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 — and proposes 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 inside monitored service environments, returning to one such configuration. The research approaches these workplaces topologically, as fields of relations in which the worker’s body is reorganised as interface, node, and image within circuits of visibility and feedback. While transforming reproduction 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, whereby bodies are reorganised as operational interfaces within distributed infrastructures of capture. Online casino studios are approached not as distinct sites but 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, not finite outcomes.
With multiple entry points and an intention to grow sideways, the inquiry develops rhizomatically. Through porosity, intersubjectivity becomes material alongside the body within these conditions. Fragments and registers accumulate over time, without pre-imposed conditions or predictive sequencing. Strategies and tactics nevertheless form cumulative nodes: writing functions as extraction, and the material produced takes shape as an archive —not a closed argument, but an assemblage of reflections, field notes, reports, integrations of multiple inputs, histories, machines, mental jumps and so on.
Within the casino’s spectacular frame, micrological scrutiny attends to a constellation of processes, including live evaluations, measurements of hand speed, scripts, protocols, algorithms, uniforms, and affects, while diagramming the penetrating gaze of permanent surveillance alongside the flickering ordinarity of time captured.
Another cut takes the form of a video installation in which cameras operate as archival instruments, converting vision into a form of labour and images into operational diagrams.
Grantee
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Miruna |
Dates and places
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2026, between Zurich and Bucharest |