{"id":2207,"date":"2015-10-16T11:35:10","date_gmt":"2015-10-16T18:35:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jamescoupe.com\/?page_id=2207"},"modified":"2015-10-16T11:35:10","modified_gmt":"2015-10-16T18:35:10","slug":"the-fussy-eye-have-you-got-a-minute","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/jamescoupe.com\/?page_id=2207","title":{"rendered":"The Fussy Eye: Have You Got a Minute?"},"content":{"rendered":"

by BRIAN MILLER
Seattle Weekly, Sept 22, 2015<\/a><\/p>\n

\"General<\/p>\n

\nCourtesy James Coupe\/Aktionsart\n<\/div>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s very voyeuristic. It\u2019s very weirdly intimate,\u201d says artist and UW professor James Coupe of his new storefront video installation in the heart of Amazonland. At the opening last week, on a very rainy Thursday evening, few of the passing tech workers paused to inspect the 18 screens, which are playing a selection from a database of 3,000 videos measuring 60 seconds each. They won\u2019t see any familiar faces on those monitors. Yet General Intellect was created, Coupe explains, using an Amazon service: Mechanical Turk, launched in 2005, which matches up menial but intelligent tasks\u2014such that a computer couldn\u2019t do\u2014with a global pool of pieceworkers. \u201cIt\u2019s about making them visible. Ingrained in the system is exploitation. Most of them are extremely low-paid,\u201d he says of these anonymous contractors. (Many, no surprise, are in India.)<\/p>\n

To create this piece, he designed a list of jobs\u2014or \u201chuman intelligence tasks,\u201d aka HITs in Amazon-speak\u2014to be performed at a flat fee of $3 for eight one-minute videos. (Other task masters pay much less.) \u201cRelatively speaking, $3 adds up to more than minimum wage,\u201d he notes\u2014roughly $24 per hour. And Coupe\u2019s 13 \u201cdatabase queries\u201d are deliberately simple and domestic, consonant with what his subjects would ordinarily be doing with their downtime. Examples include date night, eBay, boredom, and reading.<\/p>\n

Thus we see parents with children, cats being fed, toothbrushing, and other familiar household scenes. The video quality is poor, but General Intellect gives us a privileged, discomfiting view into the global sweatshop economy, like going home with a Foxconn or maquiladora worker after their shift. We see \u201ca kind of diaristic quality,\u201d says Coupe, an exploration \u201cof what makes us human, which no algorithm can generate. In a somewhat Marxist tradition, he\u2019s assigning a market value to this at-home surplus labor. But the same question applies to us all: What\u2019s our time really worth? (The gallery is housed in an old building soon to become apartments filled with Amazonians. \u201cIt\u2019s basically going to run until they tear down the building,\u201d says Coupe of his installation.) Aktionsart, 201 Westlake Ave. N., aktionsart.org. Free. Noon\u20135 p.m. Thurs.\u2013Sat. Ends Oct. 3 (or later).<\/p>\n

Brian Miller is Arts Editor for Seattle Weekly (bmiller@seattleweekly.com, 206-467-4372).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\"\"<\/a>

by BRIAN MILLER Seattle Weekly, Sept 22, 2015 Courtesy James Coupe\/Aktionsart \u201cIt\u2019s very voyeuristic. It\u2019s very weirdly intimate,\u201d says artist and UW professor James Coupe of his new storefront video installation in the heart of Amazonland. At the opening last week, on a very rainy Thursday evening, few of the passing tech workers paused to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-2207","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/jamescoupe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2207","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/jamescoupe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/jamescoupe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jamescoupe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jamescoupe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2207"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/jamescoupe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2207\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2208,"href":"http:\/\/jamescoupe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2207\/revisions\/2208"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/jamescoupe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2207"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}