out of office

Behind each screen, each piece of digital information, each data exchange, hides a complex assemblage of material and labour, which includes not only mined minerals and electrical networks, but also present and removed workforces. The obfuscated labour sometimes takes the shape of a hand that extracts, or an eye that watches endless sets of images, or an ear that attends the way the fans are roaring. The screen is thus a giant constellation of paid and unpaid labour, and any of its offered clicks is directly tied to geographically dispersed workers. These are workers who are mostly overloaded, underpaid, and highly dependent on their own screens. How can we witness the work that takes place behind the screens? Triggered by this urgent question, The Golden Pixel Cooperative (Olena Newkryta and Simona Obholzer) organised an online symposium in 2022 to which artists and thinkers were invited to respond. Titled "Screen Matters - The screen as a place of wor"k, the symposium examined various ways in which workers are being physically, emotionally, and cognitively exhausted by new forms of digital labour. The group exhibition "out of office" is an attempt at exposing this topic through the presentation of artistic works in a speculative setting—a co-working space replicated by the exhibition display aesthetics.