verfremdung / 2018
estrangement, or disillusion, to combat the alienation that workers feel within increasingly mechanized systems of production

verfremdung is a time-based work comprised of projected video, live sound performance and a mixed reality experience that seeks to critically examine the ways in which we interact with digital media and how the absurdity of those interactions intersect with shifting definitions of labor in the contemporary digital economy. verfremdung proposes the wonderland of the mediated image as factory, in which value-generating consumption is guised as entertainment and the individual is increasingly estranged from both the labor they produce and from other laboring bodies. verfremdung considers communication as a mode of social production facilitated by new capitalist imperatives where it has become increasingly difficult to distinguish between play, consumption and production, life and work, labor and non-labor. in collapsing sourced representations of physical labor, digital labor performed on platforms such as Mechanical Turk and quotidien net-surfing sessions, this project attempts to take away the illusion, to make the familiar strange, to provoke an altered perspective and a critical lucidity of the ways in which we relate to and define labor in the digital sphere.

verfremdung is created by catherine ross /
performed by catherine ross and carly barton

performed@pnca mediatheque
4.25.2018