Ayatgali Tuleubek

The Invisible Handjob of the New Economy

43 channel video installation, 2017

Each channel is displayed on a smartphone. The phones are stacked on a rack and the installation borrows the setting and the aesthetics of click farms

What is it if not the human aspect that makes hands so familiar yet so cunning? Even though much has been said about the brain’s function being responsible for labor, some would agree it is the hand’s own kind of intelligence that orchestrates seemingly rudimentary actions. Engels famously claimed it is labor that created the human, but if the hand is the main element behind this creation, then what is more human than the hand itself? And what is left to the hand in the age of technological symbiosis?

One of the odd occurrences of symbiotic relationships between the hand and tech are click farms. Click farm enterprises hire large groups of people from developing countries to click on advertising links, generate likes and at the same time simulate the usual online activity to pass through spam filters. However, the simulation of the human activity is yet another process which has recently begun to be automated. In order to pass unnoticed by recognition systems preventing such fraud, these automated systems control thousands of devices, mainly smartphones, which replicate normal human behavior online.

Such intermingling of roles is a common occurrence within the regime of cloud computing and machine automated systems. The confusion arises in the medium carrying the information itself: a machine simulates human activity so that another machine sees it as a human. All of this occurs using human mediums: text for search engine optimization, image recognition systems, and even cognitive behavior — clicking and dragging the cursor.

Photo: Installation view at Studio17, Stavanger (Norway)

Ayatgali Tuleubek (Norway)

Artist, curator. Born in 1985 in Zhambyl, Kazakhstan. He holds an MA from the Oslo Academy of the Arts (Norway). Co-curator of the Central Asian Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale (Italy, 2013, together with Tiago Bom). Tuleubek has presented solo exhibitions at UKS (Oslo, Norway, 2011), Malmøgata Fine Arts Project Space (Oslo, Norway, 2011), PODIUM, (Oslo, 2014), No Place (Oslo, 2015). He has also been included in group exhibitions at the 3rd Moscow Biennale for Young Art (Russia, 2012), Delhi International Arts Festival (New Delhi, India, 2010), Internal storage – Not Enough Space? at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art (Moscow, 2017) and Participation Effect at Stieglitz Museum (Saint Petersburg, 2017). Lives and works in Oslo, Norway.

www.ayatgali.com