In Ode to Seekers 2012 (2016), we are struck with a hybrid fiction protagonized by high-resolution computer-generated objects—an oil derrick, a syringe, and a mosquito. The trance-like pump rhythm of these three elements sets the pace for the whole film, where one drifts through tunnels and ghostly architectures of hospital corridors, in an endless fall, like Alice in Wonderland, while the film is screened inside an unfinished house, which seems to be permanently under construction. Wondering about the limits of bodies, the relational quality of their materiality and their surface, the film raises ecosystemic questions about resource extraction and human finitude.
Andrew Norman Wilson (b. 1983 El Paso/ Los Angeles) has long been inquiring into the relation between humans and machines, addressing the precarious quality of tech labor and our passive complicity with transnational corporations' self-employing schemes. In a world where “we’re all performing freelance data entry,” states Wilson, who designs elaborated image-based narratives that stress these problematics, as he brings forward the material infrastructure and labor conditions beneath information.
ScanOps (2011) is a good example of such critique, while it points fingers at the first private concession to be granted the right to reproduce intellectual property. In this photographic series that can be addressed as documentary, the artist reveals the anomalies and lapses of the hidden labor behind the production of the Google Books online archive, collecting distorted images or traces of the employees. From the scanning to the assembly of the final images—mounted inkjet prints on custom-made frames painted by uniquely selected colors—the whole production line of labor is revealed as a part of the material narrative of this document which registers a precise moment in time.
Other works by Wilson also address the value of the documentary as the best way to bring forward a critique of technology, such as Workers Leaving the Googleplex (2011), a film where the hierarchical class of Google workers is disclosed by the color of their badges as they leave the working facilities, a stratification where race discrimination appears evident in the subaltern substrates of tech labor. MM
self-presentation:
I Love It by Icona Pop, Meeting the Universe Halfway by Karen Barad, The Odes of John Keats by Helen Vendler, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll, The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon, contracting malaria, the drug addiction of a family member, and two years of chronic sinusitis due to environmental pollutants.
