Michael Straeubig, Hostile Environment Facility Training (HEFT), Playbour
Arjun Harrison Mann, "NotRelevant", Playbour
From July 14 to August 19, 2018, the Furtherfield Gallery presents its newest exhibition «Playbour: Work, Pleasure, Survival» examining the way that the boundaries between ‘play’ and ‘labour’ have become increasingly blurred, transforming the “Furtherfield Gallery” into an immersive environment comprising a series of games and offering glimpses into the gamification of all forms of life. Curated by Dani Admiss, the exhibition is the result of a collective labour initiated by Futherfield during a three-day co-creation research lab in May 2018, with artists, designers, activists, sociologists, and researchers.
Would you like to monetize your social relations? Learn from hostile designs? Take part in (unwitting) data extractions in exchange for public services?
What it means to be a worker is expanding and, over the last decade, widening strategies of surveillance and new sites of spectatorship online have forced another evolution in what can be called ‘leisure spaces’. From the self-made celebrity of the Instafamous to the live streaming of online gamers, many of us shop, share and produce online, 24/7. In certain sectors, the seeming convergence of play and labour means work is sold as an extension of our personalities and, as work continues to evolve and adapt to online cultures, where labour occurs, what is viewed as a product, and even, our sense of self, begins to change.
Today, workers are asked to expand their own skills and build self-made networks to develop new avenues of work, pleasure and survival. As they do, emerging forms of industry combine the techniques and tools of game theory, psychology and data science to bring marketing, economics and interaction design to bear on the most personal of our technologies – our smartphones and our social media networks. Profiling personalities through social media use, using metrics to quantify behaviour and conditioning actions to provide rewards, have become new norms online. As a result, much of public life can be seen as part of a process of ‘capturing play in pursuit of work’. The group engaged in artist-led experiments and playful scenarios, conducting research with fellow participants acting as ‘workers’ to generate new areas of knowledge.
Lab session leads and participants: Dani Admiss, Kevin Biderman, Marija Bozinovska Jones, Ruth Catlow, Maria Dada, Robert Gallager, Beryl Graham, Miranda Hall, Arjun Harrison Mann, Maz Hemming, Sanela Jahic, Annelise Keestra, Steven Levon Ounanian, Manu Luksch, Itai Palti, Andrej Primozic, Michael Straeubig, Cassie Thornton, Cecilia Wee and Jamie Woodcock.
Source Furtherfield – More information here
Cover: Marija Bozinovska Jones, “Treebour”, Playbour
