The future of work: scaffolds and agencies

Abstract

Johanna Bruckner is an artist whose work explores, through film installations, performative scripts, and writings, the tensions at the heart of urban and socio-political constructions within the framework of late capitalism. She uses performance and collaborative performative design as an organising principle for social practice, ref lection, and new propositions. She has been producing a series of work in the HafenCity in Hamburg, Germany, in an urban area that was once a thriving commercial harbour zone, became abandoned when the container age took over, and is now being redeveloped as a f lagship urban district mixing heritage with f lexible economic models. The following ref lection, which runs parallel to her performative scripts and films, investigates abstract and virtual micro-agencies engulfing the bodies of workers and inhabitants alike in the redeveloped district of the harbour city. In particular, Bruckner unveils the circumstances linking manual labour to macro-data and technological progress from the perspective of automation and the f loating f luxes of algorithmic finance at the core of the twenty-first-century port city.