Exhibition
'paula' & Work: A Document on the Machinic Enslavement in Academic Capitalism 2023-24
7 May 2024 – 14 May 2024
Regular hours
- Monday
- Closed
- Tuesday
- 10:00 – 18:00
- Wednesday
- 10:00 – 18:00
- Thursday
- 10:00 – 18:00
- Friday
- 10:00 – 18:00
- Saturday
- 10:00 – 18:00
- Sunday
- 10:00 – 18:00
Free admission
Address
- London South Bank University
- 103 Borough Road
- London
- SE1 0AA
- United Kingdom
Travel Information
- Buses: 1, 12, 35, 40, 45, 53, 63, 68, 100, 133, 148, 155, 168, 171, 172, 176, 188, 196, 333, 344, 360, 363, 453, 468, C10 and P5.
- Train/Tube: Waterloo, London Bridge and Elephant & Castle
This project offers an exploration of identity and technology during a critical time for the arts and humanities in the UK.
About
In early 2024, following a semester after my sabbatical to work with Generative AI, the threat of closure of Arts and Humanities departments at universities across the UK is a reality. The artwork produced in this charged political climate addresses the trauma of precarity and the specific trauma around the loss of identity.
By adopting an auto-ethnographic approach, the project crafts academic portraits and texts that together weave a technobiography. This narrative emerges from a blend of algorithmic models, deep archival research, and elements of speculative fiction, providing a reflective narrative on academic capitalism and the personal stories entwined with it.
The exhibition, conceptualised as a publication-installation, unveils data amassed from computers and the internet related to 'paula,' offering an experimental perspective on algorithmic datafication. It ventures into autobiographic fiction, where the corporate strategy of a university is processed through machine learning to narrate 'paula's' life story in the first person.