Work, Comfort, Home

Michael Mönnich is a photographer and video-maker based in Munich. His works explore the hidden world of Data-generated content and the human workforce sustaining it. Who trains algorithms in the first place ? Humans do. The workforce is recruited through different platforms, in order to perform « discrete on-demand tasks that computers are currently unable to do ».

In Work, Comfort, Home (2020) Michael dealt with a data set of 68.8 hours of video material. In his own words « the visual archive was produced entirely by internet workers across the globe in order to train algorithms ». Within this set of visual documentation he selected those made by one family of workers. He reaches out to a pool of anonymous workers willing to contribute to his films.

He recurrently asks them to perform certain sets of actions, such as in the installation work On-Demand Workforce (2018) previously exhibited at The Balcony, The Hague, and the Galerie Der Künstlerinnen, Munich. Thus perverting neo-liberal systems to his own artistic goals Michael Mönnich invites us to reflect upon the shaping of labor in our data-oriented society as well as the new forms of « on-demand » labor.