Interface: Art + Stability

And yet, (1) there’s a kind of nostalgia for a phone interface all of a sudden as much of that has gone away and then (2) you also see the meteoric rise of something like Clubhouse, which suddenly became a kind of fad and interest in audio, in this speaking. 

I wonder if in those discussions, was there something particular about… Because some of it was about leaving a voice message. 

What was it about the phone and the voice as a part of an organizing principle or a kind of connectivity in terms of thinking, not just artistically but organizationally?

Yeah. Well, I guess there’s an immediacy about phone-based interfaces and it worked well, I think, with the fictional proposal that we were making. 

We were representing a community of artists who would have disappeared from online platforms. 

So we were reverting to these earlier, more dated technologies and reanimating these spaces that had been abandoned with the arrival of digital platforms. Not that phone… I mean, the phone interface is ultimately a digital platform also, but there’s something about the interface that feels quite different. 

And as to the voice element–I’m someone who comes from a background of transmission-based practices. I spent a number of years working in radio as a broadcaster and a lot of experimental uses of transmission technology, so working with the telephone as a transmission technology was an interesting exploration for us, I think.

Yeah. And as a transmission–because it was to receive a message, but also–was it an exchange? 

Was it also to send a message? 

Was it a send and receive system or it was…

It was an interactive system. 

But the main thing that we developed as part of this project was a number of prerecorded messages and the user navigates through these messages by means of a touch tone interface. 

The system is collecting responses from callers, but they’re digital responses. 

They’re like numerical responses that can then be analyzed as data, basically. 

The thrust of the questions was what kinds of challenges, problems, and frustrations did you face as someone who’s trying to make a living as a creative person. 

We proposed possible challenges that people might be facing that are based on our own lived experience as artists. We were trying to… 

We were using these as prompts to get people to think about the situation that they find themselves in.

Some of that is economic: 

“Has your work been stolen? 

“Have you been underpaid for the work that you’ve produced?” 

“Have you lost control over your intellectual property?” 

But there were also other considerations, other forms of exploitation other than economic: 

“Are you in an exploitative or abusive relationship with your employer or the client that has contracted you?” 

And “what are the intersections of that with other forms of exploitation around, say, gender or age or racialization or economic class?”

There’s no doubt. 

Terms are vitally important. 

Choice of terms is not trivial and I think that it has a huge impact on how things are perceived. 

One of the things about Artwork_Local404 is it participates in the language of union, but I think it’s really trying to get at the fundamentals of the idea of union, which have over time I think largely been forgotten. 

I think current understandings of organized labor are very institutionalized. 

There’s a connotation of heavy bureaucracy, top heaviness, all that stuff, right? 

This is partly why unions have such a bad rap in contemporary society: there’s all of this structure. Right? 

But I think the understanding that the four of us had in proposing the union was we’re inspired by non-institutionalized ideas about basic union and solidarity. Right?

I think probably the closest antecedent would be the IWW (International Workers of the World), the one big union, which really tries to keep away from what ended up happening in the union movement, which was a heavy bureaucratization and ultimately division, right? 

The fact that you’re in these very small negotiating units is really very much counter to the fundamental idea of, “We stand together.” 

The working class and the ruling class had nothing, like those sorts of very basic.. Idealistic sure, perhaps even a little simplistic, but like those are the stark, founding realities of the union movement and I think it was important to recenter those understandings.

Going back to the criticism that is often launched against the union, that bureaucratic of… That slowing things down is a bad thing, that we have characterized that slowness as a problem, that it’s one of the, I think, most challenging parts of contemporary society is to figure out where we need to go slower and where we do need to go faster. 

We’re extremely slow in figuring out how we can care for a wider range of people, how to deal with issues of, for instance, access to water, extremely slow. 

And yet there’s other places where we need, whether it’s a bureaucracy or to move slowly, to actually resist the speed in order to have different kinds of considerations. So trying to figure out, too, a way where, actually, slowness is a value that is, we need more of, we need to slow certain things down.

I think it’s a really great point and deliberation basically is what needs to take sufficient time. Democracy is a slow process and must be so in order to be meaningful. 

So this is, I think, part and parcel of that.