Brown Bag Seminar: Benjamin Gerdes- Haunt the System: Working with Ghosted Labour in Supply-Chain and Data Infrastructure to Generate Counter-Claims around Sustainability

In our contemporary society, the operations of transport logistics and intelligent automation technology heavily rely on ghost work – forms of human labour concealed from public view. The circulation of goods and information to our homes and workplaces is aesthetically misrepresented as a clean and frictionless system. It is an inconvenient (and often costly) truth that a system sold on reliability has so many pockets of conflict and uncertainty, which is why these tales of labour conditions are relegated to the ghostly. They are drowned out, underwater echoes of a system usually only seen from above surface, with the sea represented as a network upon which goods and information glide in smooth coordination. Despite the consumer aesthetic, software operations and global logistics industries together represent primary engines for capital accumulation and exertion of state power today. Here artistic research poses a unique opportunity to engage with these conditions of visuality by offering counter-aesthetics that communicate the messy, wasteful, and often extractive nature of these networks in order to co-produce new visions for more sustainable and just uses of these tools.

Benjamin Gerdes  is the PI of the artistic research project “Ghost Platform: Generating the “Complex Image” of Data, Labour, and Logistics”  funded by Vetenskapsrådet (2022-2025).

Register for the seminar and a vegan sandwich here!