Every other article in the economy pages of newspapers contains the sentence: “The working world is undergoing rapid change.[1]” Digitization, extensive automatization, and even the changing expectations of employees and new concepts of working are revolutionizing the world of work, over and over again. Online HR consultants are always immediately on hand with tips for turning this huge transformation to one’s own advantage. This new situation is generally known in Europe as “Work 4.0,” while the common phrase in other parts of the world is “New Work.”
The five finalists of the MAST Photography Grant 2023—Farah Al-Qasimi, Hicham Gardaf, Lebohang Kganye, Maria Mavropoulou, Salvatore Vitale—all engage so conspicuously with the transformation of work that it is worth looking at it in some depth.
The first step towards the new world of work was enabled through the introduction of steam and water power, which opened the way in turn for the development of machines for production and ships for transport. For the first time, products could be made in large volumes by machine. Retrospectively, this first step of the industrial revolution in the mid-18th century might be called “Work 1.0.” The second step, i.e., “Work 2.0,” followed around a century later as a result of electrification. Its key feature was the possibility, for the first time, of creating spatial separation between the energy consumer—e.g., an electric motor or a light—and the power plant in which a variety of primary energy sources (such as water, coal, or oil) are transformed into electricity. In the field of industry, it ushered in a new independence from spatially limited and mechanically complex energy distribution systems, such as the transmission wave. This permitted increasingly small and detailed segmentation of the work steps. An important symbol of this was—and continues to be—the assembly line production employed in the Ford factories.
The 1970s heralded the beginning of “Work 3.0,” the third significant wave of industrial, technological revolution. The speed of automation increased from then on; gradually, this was supported by computers, later by industrial robots. And today “Work 4.0” is underway, concurrently with the fourth revolution, which the Italian philosopher Luciano Floridi has described as an incursion and domination of information and communications technologies: “The information society is better seen as a neo-manufacturing society in which raw materials and energy have been superseded by data and information, the new digital gold and the real source of added value.”[2]
We usually term the period encompassing these 250 years the industrial revolution, especially when we are thinking principally of technical, technological development, or industrial capitalism, when the focus lies on the economic shift that went hand in hand with the industrial revolution, or the modern period, when we consider more generally the social and cultural changes linked with it.
Time did not stand still in the period before these particular 250 years: A flourishing mercantile capitalism had existed in Europe since the High Middle Ages and even earlier in the Arab world and in China. “The period of European state building would not have been possible without the capitalism of the Medici, Fugger, or Baring families.”[3] There was also the grim plantation capitalism that had been established during the colonisation of the world in the 16th century, not to mention the agrarian capitalism that had “lead to the consolidation of large estates in the hands of noble and burgher owners. The landlords of central and eastern Europe sold their grain crops on the international markets according to capitalist principles, but exploited their labourers in bondage, through serfdom or slavery.”[4]
Yet, the dynamism, the speed, the radicalness with which technology, science, and the economy developed in these 250 years was almost monstrous. As a result, we often speak of this period as a time of permanent revolution, of development at breakneck speed that shook the foundations of every generation at least once over the course of life. Karl Marx described it like this: “Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones.”[5] Continuous, ever accelerating innovation became the central motor of society, which consequently found itself in repeated revolution. Wage labour became a mass phenomenon, and ways of life changed constantly as a result of changing work places, work shifts, work hierarchies. Retrospectively, it is evident that nothing remained untouched by these changes. From the workers’ struggles of the 19th century, the starvation wages, the trade unions, to the revaluation of work during the golden age of the social market economy in the 1960s and 1970s, and to the knowledge workers and a situation that Thomas Friedmann, writer on globalisation and structural change in the Information Age, has described in an interview in this way: “Because if work is being extracted from jobs, and if jobs and work are being extracted from companies—and because, (…) we’re now in a world of flows—then learning has to become lifelong. We have to provide both the learning tools and the learning resources for lifelong learning when your job becomes work and your company becomes a platform.”[6] His words highlight once again the fundamental change in work today – leaving aside the increasing influence of artificial intelligence for now.
That brings us to the works of the finalists of our MAST Photography Grant 2023.
Farah Al-Qasimi focuses on the large Arabic community in Dearborn, Michigan. Wikipedia provides a description of the city: “The city is the home town of Henry Ford and the location of the international headquarters of the Ford Motor Company. The development and character of the city is largely due to Ford. (…) With over 29,000 Americans of Arabic heritage (according to a census of 2010, this is equivalent to 41.7 % of the city’s population), Dearborn is home to the second largest Arabic population in the United States. Arabs first located here in order to work in the automobile industry. (…) Dearborn is the location of the Ford Rouge Complex. (…). In its heyday it employed 100,000 workers and produced complete vehicles.”[7] Al-Qasimi moved around the city by day and by night and observed it as a transport and cultural system. She did not attempt to enter the Ford factories, as free photography is not usually permitted there; instead, she observed the people, their activity, their waiting, their journey to work, and the impact of their activities and reactions on the walls of the city. She has created a kind of amalgam of views onto the real city and onto the city as it is photographed, covered in posters, in other words, views of private and public signs in a city that represents a mix of Arabic and American manifestations. Finally, Al-Qasimi re-stages the photographed worlds like a piece of city wall in the exhibition space, with all its overlapping layers, with all its personal and cultural codes.
Lebohang Kganye is a seductive and deeply visual storyteller in equal measure. She stages scenes from South African life like a Chinese shadow theater using card figures and theatrical lighting and combines them in the exhibition space to create both small and large-scale productions. She re-enacts, re-imagines, re-installs and re-mixes real situations, real events using literary reflections and exaggerations to create impressive fantastic-real image theater. “In the project Keep the Light Faithfully (2022) Kganye re-imagines western literature of the rarely known and gendered narratives of hundreds of women light keepers from the 19th and 20th century, including Lenore Skomal’s The Lighthouse Keeper’s Daughter (2010) – a tale of Ida Lewis, who tended the light at Lime Rock Lighthouse. As history would have it, Lewis became known for her many rescues of men in the Atlantic Ocean near Rhode Island, from as early as 1858.”[8] Yet, Kganye returned empty handed from her research trip on the topic, as practically all lighthouses are automated, the female lighthouse keepers have disappeared. But here, bound into oral histories, she stages and invents new stories and thereby resurrects the lightkeepers. In recent years she has been constantly on a search for collective memories, as she herself has written, the sort of “tales marked by long periods of isolation, of their rescues, of voyages disrupted by storm-tossed seas and gale-force winds, stories of the monotonous tasks that frame the life of a lightkeeper – as well as the impact of rapid technological developments and advancements on an already relatively invisible form of labour and public service.”[9]
Salvatore Vitale’s project Death through GPS is radical in several respects. His presentation acts simultaneously like a laboratory, a TV-studio, and an agitative event. The artist combines documentary photography with staged sabotage videos, sampled video and hard edited video. Everything is presented in front of an ultramarine blue wall, a storage and presentation rack. His subject is cutting edge, it expresses a question about the human being in the current technological revolution, in which every action, every being is determined by technology, by the automatization of working processes, and by the market. Vitale writes: “The first part of this long-term project focuses on the region of Gauteng, South Africa, and establishes a link between the gig economy, the mining industry and the idea of technological sabotage. In the context of late capitalism and as a consequence of the outsourcing of work, human beings became ‘software extensions.’ This position opens up a paradox, in which workers develop new strategies to sabotage, to fight and strike against the software.”[10] The artist repeatedly abandons the position of the documentary maker, employs workers at reasonable wages, detonates digital tools, even laptops. In the vicinity of Johannesburg, he moves in the grey area between the gig economy and a gold rush mentality, between data and material, and frequently films people, young people, living in many ways precarious lives.
Hicham Gardaf’s approach appears at first glance to be the exact opposite of Salvatore Vitale’s research. His work is called In Praise of Slowness; it is the other side of the coin. If Vitale’s video begins with an extremely hectic, extremely tense young car driver, who almost seems to have his first heart attack in a traffic jam, in Gardaf’s photographs and film, we experience calm, a normal heartbeat, even a relaxed rhythm of life, yet with an equally stressful workload. Gardaf’s project takes place in Tangier. Its subject is the opposition between the prospering, growing, expanding part of the city on the one hand and the old town with its ancient sounds, cooling walls, its measured steps on the other hand. The artist shows us this in his photography and in his film through men, street merchants, who announce their stock of bleaching agent with the ever-same cry, bringing it to the inhabitants and later collecting the empty plastic bottles. It is an ever-repeating ritual with the stillness and strength of an activity that is embedded in the social and cultural realm. Dominik Czechowski has written on it in his impressive text: “Under the influence of advanced technology on everyday life and of the forces of capitalistic deterritorialization (Deleuze and Guattari) with their politics of destabilization and erosion, Tangier, a hybrid city with constantly expanding industrial areas, is undergoing a social revolution par excellence as well as accelerated urbanisation.” Gardaf has been following this progress with evident scepticism, because we lose our centre, our inner orientation in it and, with time, we become ceaselessly restless, defined by the rules of technology and the booming market. In this sense, Salvatore and Hicham are brothers in spirit.
We have deliberately left Maria Mavropoulou until last in this introduction. In her works, she goes a clear step further than we have so far known how or have been able to go. Maria Mavropoulou’s In their own image, in the image of God they created them uses current, freely available AI technology. Nikolas Ventourakis has described her approach in this way: “Mavropoulou enters a series of text prompts into a text-to-image algorithm: ‘A complex and ingenious structure of pipes, valves, manometers, which are used in oil refineries’. The AI, which at this point has access to an unimaginably vast amount of data, does not need a muse in order to be inspired. Billions of photos serve as reference points and guide the machine to its goal of interpreting the query through a visual output, which fulfils the apparent essence of these parameters, but also plays abstractly upon them. The artist then selects one image from the algorithmically composed pictures, one that appeals to her aesthetically, and, in a second step, prompts the program to create more variations of it. The individual pictures would then be used as tile elements in her compositions.” Maria Mavropoulou then develops the result further, multiplies the tiles, connects them, selects, and, through subtle reflection and duplication, she makes the picture, the resulting image world, seem familiar to us. In this way, such powerful, almost wildly fiery pictures are created that we are forced to ask whether AI could at some point make artworks with greater meaning—rather than asking whether this has irrevocably placed into doubt the referentiality of a photograph to reality. For the decisive moment is here the step from language to image, which the AI, with the aid of an enormous training archive, takes to transform the inputted statement into images the origins of which we will never fully be able to trace.
Indeed, work, the world of work, and the images of work are truly caught in a rapidly spinning carousel.
[1] https://www.personio.de/hr-lexikon/arbeit-4-0
[2] Luciano Floridi: The Fourth Revolution: How the Infosphere is Reshaping Human Reality". Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014, p. 218
[3] Jürgen Kochta: Arbeit im Kapitalismus. Lange Linien der historischen Entwicklung bis heute, aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte, ISSN 2194-3621, Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, Bonn, Vol. 65, Iss. 35/37, pp. 10-17, 2015
[4] Jürgen Focke: Arbeit im Kapitalismus. Lange Linien der historischen Entwicklung bis heute, aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte, ISSN 2194-3621, Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, Bonn, Vol. 65, Iss. 35/37, pp. 10-17, 2015
[5] Karl Marx, zit. Ebenda, 2015
[6] Deloitte interviews Thomas Friedman: The Future of Work - Consultant's Mind (consultantsmind.com)
[7] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dearborn (6.12.2022)
[8] Lebohang Kganye, unpublished notes, 2022.
[9] Lebohang Kganye, unpublished notes, 2022
[10] Salvatore Vitale: Death through GPS, unpublished notes, 2022