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“So literally, I was like, what the fuck? Get these down. What are you doing? It’s as if I was the head of Gucci, and there’s all these knockoffs.”
“We can keep suppressing the wages of Uber drivers—keep them below the cost of living—because they can always supplement by renting out their apartment on Airbnb.”
“Terms & Expectations,” a group exhibition curated by Barbara Cueto & Bas Hendrikx, open’s at Toronto’s InterAccess. Focused on “distribution centres as agents within our natural environment,” the show hones in on critical infrastructure that underpins platform capitalism (e.g. the ubiquitous Amazon fulfilment centre). Featured are artists including Hiba Ali Simon Denny, Sophia Oppel, and Coralie Vogelaar, contributing works in mediums ranging from installation to performance.
“Using fear-mongering about package theft and suburban crime, a surveillance company has convinced countless homes to affix a surveillance network node. Now they want us to laugh about it all in our (ideally) Ring-surveilled homes.“
“For me the phrase was the perfect title for the exhibition, encompassing why Amazon is such a ruthless company, and how they make this fact incredibly overt, both to their employees and customer base.”
“Enough people purchased the preservative to attempt suicide that the company’s algorithm began suggesting other products that customers frequently bought along with it to aid in such efforts.”
“We aren’t used to thinking about these systems in terms of the environmental costs. But saying, ‘Hey, Alexa, order me some toilet rolls,’ invokes into being this chain of extraction, which goes all around the planet.”
Work produced during the Toronto-based South Asian Visual Arts Centre’s (SAVAC) ADA-DADA Residency is shared online. Spanning CGI, videogames, and fiction, pieces by CAM Collective, Vishal Kumararswamy, Lingxian Wu, and others are accessible via the RPG-esque gather.town platform. Overarching themes include migration, alienation, and exploitation, with Hiba Ali’s The Real Love Memo V.2 (image) generating anti-Amazon critiques in response to an infamous Jeff Bezos memo.
Simon Denny’s solo exhibition “Mine” opens at Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York City, disentangling “data mining, mineral mining, and the mechanization of labor.” The show brings together recent works, like Denny’s massive cardboard mining machines clad in cartoony videogame textures, as well as newer ones: the artist’s 2021 sculpture of a patented Amazon delivery drone comes alive with an animated AR model of a mineral-rich Earth that is drawn from mineral mining propaganda.
Artist-researchers Adam Harvey and Jules LaPlace, in collaboration with the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (S.T.O.P.), launch Exposing.AI, an online tool that lets users find out whether their Flickr photos have been used for training commercial face recognition and biometric analysis systems. The web app scans across twelve notorious datasets and provides deep analysis: MegaFace (image), for example, includes 3,311,471 Flickr photos used by Amazon, Google, and other corporate giants.
Propelled by a huge increase of online purchases during the pandemic, and in the midst of the worst economic upheaveal since the Great Depression, Jeff Bezos’ net worth increases $4.9 billion, making the Amazon founder and CEO the world’s first-ever person to amass a $200 billion fortune.
“She was the first person to realize that this problem exists, to talk about it, and do academic work around it until the powers that be took notice.”
“This is a particularly dangerous message to send during a pandemic, when chilling worker speech about health and safety practices could literally be a matter of life and death.”
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