Data Messiahs

Single Channel Film (2017)

“An urgent work that addresses life in the city today” - Mid-Day

“Data Messiahs curated at an exhibition of new video works in Denmark” - ET4U Contemporary Art

The film foregrounds the unprecedented volume of labour-intensive digital service industries in South Asia. It features two Beckettian-style real-life employees, who induct and train hundreds of workers for Digital Tech Companies every month. These Initiation Day experts profile the personalities of new recruits, engage them with attention techniques, and verify their background data. Their twisting, gambolling, purposeful bodies are seen alongside the architecture of dreams they inhabit, a site of abundant capital built on data-trade. The building and the gate keepers seem engaged in a pas de deux, staging their spectacular theatre of the absurd, till exhaustion interrupts and brings them to a suicidal halt.

This film is part of my art series BACK TO WORK. Under the auspices of an art commission, I approached HCL Tech Pvt Ltd. for a placement in their company. HCL Tech Pvt Ltd is the biggest IT company in India. I proposed an employment contract in which I declared the request for a job as an art project. By going to ‘work’ everyday, for a period lasting 6 months, I embedded a series of performance acts that allowed me to highlight the structure of social and political relations with all its ambiguities. How is productivity, idleness, and attention measured and quantified across the dispensable resource of contemporary digital capital? I wanted to open these, and more questions. by inhabiting the dual role of the artist and the worker.

Medium Single channel projection (wall-size), 16:00 mins.

Shown at Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, VAICA Video Art Festival, and at the Contemporary Video Art Festival, ET4U Denmark.

Vimeo Link - https://vimeo.com/632875722 (link is password protected. For inquiries, please email)