Accumulative Care (2019)
Installation
Voice-over, Toyin Adeyinka 
London Gallery West, Westminster University
Photo: Jalaikon

Accumulative Care is a four-piece care-installation with audio-relaxation exercises developed from conversations with digital workers such as data entry workers, content moderators, gamers, sex workers and influencers about their occupational health.

The relaxation exercises maps the work-specific ailments, pressure, stress, or pain of working in the digital economy. The installation explores how feminist and care-informed artistic methodologies present new ways to conceptualise the relationship between bodies and technology from a place of sentient experience rather than visual representation. The project examines the concepts of social and bodily risks associated with new forms of digital labour omitted in a digital discourse that forefronts shiny technical products, but nevertheless relies on exploitative chains of production that range from data producing child gamers, prosumers, influencers, and online sex workers, content moderators, data entry workers, metal miners, and hardware assembly workers. Using the format of care as the basis for the installation, the artistic practice present digital labour as a question of mental labour which frames the viewers body.

The project was kindly supported by the AHRC.