The University of the Phoenix’s Institute for Digital Forensics and Applied Witchcraft is pleased to display two extremely rare and dangerous artifacts in the context of SILENT WORKS exhibition: the only two complete physical manifestations of a curse woven by an uncertain number of Mechanical Turk (MTurk) workers to abolish Amazon.
One hand-written book and one vinyl record represent the only two objects with the complete curse inscribed on them. The curse was collaboratively created by potentially millions of exploited workers around the world, past, present and future. It was encoded by these workers in fragments of text into Amazon's empire of platforms, sometimes appearing visibly in the user comments of Amazon's hegemonic marketplace, other times smuggled into code and laced throughout the vast netherworld of Amazon’s servers.
Together, these fragments represent a claim to an unpayable debt and a common dream of revenge for the horrors Amazon as a corporation has loosed upon the world and its workers.
Yet beside the two artifacts to be displayed, the curse only exists in one other place: distributed in fragments across Amazon's massive digital empire. Thus, the only entities with the access and capacity to reassemble and "read" the entire curse is Amazon's own powerful and proprietary AIs.
The Institute’s seers have informed us that, in a number of potential futures, those Amazon AIs, upon "finding" and "reassembling" the curse from the fragments, will be triggered to either abolish itself and its parent entity (Amazon) or “switch sides,” becoming a powerful asset in workers' struggle and the creation of a post-capitalist world.
This artistic contribution is presented on two tables. On one there is a record player attached to headphones. Visitors are invited to use cotton archival gloves to touch the needle down and hear part of the curse. On the second table there is a single unique hardback book. Visitors are invited to use cotton archival gloves to browse through its content.
For the purposes of safety, the University of the Phoenix is taking every precaution to make sure the entire curse never takes complete digital form in any format (for instance as a text or audio file). When assembled in a digital form (as it is throughout Amazons' empire) the curse is extremely powerful. As a result, digital photography and sound recording is strictly forbidden for the safety of everyone involved, and signs to this effect will be placed on each table, warning visitors of the dire consequences.
Preparing for the SILENT WORKS exhibition, The Institute has been carefully sourcing all elements of the curse using a variety of methods and also (over-)paying current MTurk workers to “smuggle” fragments of the curse into Amazon’s platforms. No MTurk worker or human outside of The University's staff will ever see the completed curse.
https://soundcloud.com/berliner-gazette/university-of-the-phoenix-silent-works
The University of the Phoenix (UotP), a collaboration between artist Cassie Thornton and scholar-activist Max Haiven, is a free-school and research institute for the dead that is also sometimes open to not-yet-dead auditors. Working at the intersection of research, art and activism UotP instigates locally-informed collaborations for radical financial literacy. In an age when technologically-accelerated financialization and debt overshadows social and political life UotP offers revenge consultancy services to those wronged by global capitalism. UotP instigates conversations, produces and distributes disruptive media, and plots uninvited appearances of the otherwise invisibilized.
