Fancy Artiste’s statement
Jews Without Enough Money
Hank Schnitzel
In her catalogue essay and in the 2018 Whitney exhibition “Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art, 1965-2018,” curator Christiane Paul separates digital art into 2 domains. One domain was devoted to rules algorithms: how rule-based art, inspired by the programmable computer, influenced art practices starting in the 1960s. The other domain, titled “Signal, Sequence, Resolution,” focuses on digital images, starting with cinema and including work that engages with the social, cultural, and political impacts of digital technologies. “The artworks exhibited in this group point to the profound changes that technologies have brought about… [altering] the fabric of society as a whole.”
I have worked as a software developer for over 30 years. In order to best depict the struggle of a software developer to maintain her or his agency in the face of Agile Methodologies, I chose the form of the graphic novel: In a parallel manifestation of this struggle, I have illustrated it by using gig platforms to hire over 200 artists and illustrators from around the globe. Based on the prompts provided, they produced illustrations according to their own dictates and tastes.
By my choice of artistic medium, I have sought to reify the forces that have reconfigured the workplace and devalued physical and intellectual labor. Gig platforms such as fiverr, peopleperhour, guru, and upwork have effaced the artist: I have sought to foreground their labor while simultaneously depicting my own profession challenges in the themes of the novel.
Unfortunately, some of the profound changes that digital technologies have wrought fall somewhat beyond the vision of the artist. Art is generally a solitary, bespoke activity conducted at some remove from the modern technological enterprise, and, as accessible as social media may be, the world of software development is mostly inaccessible and in conflict with the artistic project.
So it’s understandable that the profound impacts that digital technologies have had on the workplace have escaped artistic attention. Despite the current fascination with “AI,” whose effects are barely emerging, the digital technologies have already reconfigured the workplace: scheduling software helps retailers limit labor costs (and worker benefits); gig platforms provide contingent, erratic employment in fields as diverse as food delivery and web development. In the software industry, “Agile Methodologies” break down intellectual work into discrete tasks, reducing the developer, who had been an intellectual worker (and who had attained status and financial reward through accumulated knowledge and skills), to the status of an interchangeable cog in the assembly-line manufacture of modern software products.
