Door: Joana Moll
ARTIST TALK
AN AUTOPSY OF ONLINE LOVE, LABOUR, SURVEILLANCE AND ELECTRICITY/ENERGY
Joana Moll (Artist and Researcher, ES) in conversation with Tatiana Bazzichelli (Founding Director, Disruption Network Lab, IT/DE).
“Our so-called networked society has failed so far to transpose the logic of interconnectedness into our lives. Citizens are becoming increasingly machine-like and dependent on data, threatening the connection between humans and their natural habitats. Although most of our daily transactions are carried out through electronic devices, we know very little of the apparatus that facilitates such interactions, or in other words, about the factory that lies beyond the interface. In this talk, artist Joana Moll will try to trace the connection between interfaces, patriarchy, data, language, business models, free labour, surveillance, CO2 and domesticated electricity. She will specifically go into two of her recent projects, The Dating Brokers and The Hidden Life of an Amazon User, as well as into how she involves community in her work. The Dating Brokers casts light on well established practices in the global online dating ecosystem, which are crucial to its business model but mostly opaque to their users. Dating profiles contain intimate information on users and the over-exploitation and misuse of this data can have dramatic effects on their lives. The Hidden Life of an Amazon User sheds light on Amazon’s often unacknowledged but aggressive exploitation of their users, which is embedded at the core of the so-called internet companies’ business strategies. To put it bluntly, the Amazon user is not just exploited by means of their free labor, but is also forced to assume the energy costs of such exploitation.”
