The surrogate labor of the eye: Farocki, Papa, and the eeefff collective

ABSTRACT The following essay explores the work of art as a site of encounter with human perceptual labor that plays a role in technical operations. It tackles the way such labor is deemed obsolete, soon to be replaced, and therefore surrogate even if it actually animates and reproduces automated vision systems. It explores how art goes about representing the ways in which such labor is undervalued and unrecognized. The text argues for reading in between the lines and images of Harun Farocki’s films, installations, and writings where the obsolescence of human labor emerges more as an ideological screen than a fact. It focuses on moments in his oeuvre which indicate that human labor, including cognition as automation’s last frontier, is not automated away but persists, changes site, undergoes restructuring, and becomes more hidden. More recent works by the eeefff collective and Elisa Giardina Papa explore the intertwined roles of human affection and vision labor in the necessarily failed attempts to teach machines to see and feel, to “clean” the algorithmic vision and affection from opacity and the queerness of real life. Both artists leave behind Farocki’s self-reflexive, detached spectator to involve the audience in more situated and embodied experiences of perception labor and the particular ways in which such labor has become outsourced and dispersed in semi-peripheries such as Sicily or Belarus. They try to express the price that people pay with their emotions and bodies for such work. Yet, in principle, they follow Farocki’s take on labor’s in/visibility in that they challenge the ruling ideologies that blind human vision to the realities of labor. The essay also pays attention to the ways in which both artistic and technical vision today are pre-determined by the logic of the gig economy.