Self-sufficient Nodes

Ananya Panda

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Thesis

I am a Graphic Designer and Illustrator interested in representation and communication, how the physical viewing of images shifts our perceptual maps of ourselves in relation to others, and the afterlife of images. Currently occupied with the societal impact of emerging technologies such as AI, my practice revolves around collecting and reconfiguring materials, forms, gestures and stories across space and time to forge new constellations of meaning. Through the use of storytelling and worldbuilding, I hope to produce fixed and moving images that aid in the amplification of perspectives marginalized in and by design, raise important questions about our time and challenge particularities masquerading as Universalism.

Self-sufficient nodes is a mixed media installation, critiquing the abstraction of human labor that powers Artificial Intelligence. Through the subversion of the requester interface of Amazon Mechanical Turk, a crowdsourcing platform, affords us a view into the lived realities of “Artificial Artificial Intelligence”, the global, on-demand, 24x7 workforce that labels, cleans, organises the data that enables machine learning.

Still from "Self-sufficient nodes"

Deliberately ignoring the protocols of use of the platform, the workers are tasked with short exercises to relax their hands, 1 minute meditation breaks and drawing exercises. The platform is transformed into a tool of interrogation into the struggles of living and working in the recesses of the contemporary labor market, creating a space for conversation between isolated workers dispersed in the cloud through a collection of screenshots, shared google docs, excel sheets, found and recorded videos.

Aggregated drawings and responses from workers

...potentially creating a provocation for the viewers, along with an invitation to become entangled in this complex web.