Focusing on the backend of AI and machine learning processes, Aarti Sunder’s film, Ghost Cut – Some Clear Pixels Amongst Many Black Boxes turns to techno-futurist ideas, through her research on the Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) platform.
MTurk is a crowdsourcing marketplace that enables individuals and businesses to outsource their processes and jobs to a global workforce, who can perform these tasks virtually and within the confines of their homes. Sunder’s’ film explores the outsourcing of labour, a precarious, isolated entity, which in turn, trains AI platforms to generate ‘objective’ data. She investigates the relationships between the analogic, digital, and the terrestrial.
The artist draws on conversations with Amazon MTurk workers and their relationship with the politics of the Mechanical Turk platform – the varying levels of transparencies and opacities that make the platform what it is.
Aarti Sunder is an artist living and working in India (Chennai). She works with moving image, writing, drawing and painting. Her interests lie within techno-politics, focusing on the study of infrastructure and society – from contemporary labour practices, fictional edges of protest, myth, and digital-terrestrial play to expanded platform politics. Aarti published Platform Politics - Within, Above and Under, a short set of contributions that considered different readings into the idea of the platform. Ideas ranged from contemporary philosophy to online niche spaces, to education, AI/labour, and the future of gig work. Currently she is working on technology and its relationship with the spiritual, where those overlaps become a mode of governance and what kinds of visuals are born out of that relationship.
Aarti has exhibited her work at Hayy Jameel, the Singapore Biennale 22, 1ShanthiRoad, Haus der Kulturen Der Welt, MIT, Warehouse421, Goethe Insitute, Kunstverein Leipzig, BauhausImaginista, Alserkal Avenue, ISCP and the Museum of Yugoslav History. She has been the recipient of grants and fellowships from MIT, Sommerakademie Paul Klee, Ashkal Alwan, Harvard FSC Film Center, Sarai and Khoj, Akademie Der Kunstand Sharjah Art Foundation amongst others. Recent screenings of her work include the 67th BFI London Film Festival and Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin 2023. Currently her work is being shown at the Albertinum - Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden in Germany.
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