Dejan Marković

Winter Semester 2018/19

MA Course: Knowledge Forms
Number: 155.806
Institute for Contemporary Art
Faculty of Architecture
Graz University of Technology

Over the last few years, technological developments – especially in the fields of robotics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning – have accelerated markedly. “Smartness” and “intelligence” manifested through machinic judgments, driving and sensing emotion will strongly impact not only the field of architecture but also everyday life. The promise offered by scores, various predictions, and lists of dying professions and jobs is that the new automation aims to impact the work activities for a large number of people, in a very short time. The course ‘Digital Worker: Witnesses of a transformation’ investigates this labor reconfiguration: material and immaterial, low paid and high paid, low skilled and high skilled, long in tradition and new, all that aim to be, or are currently in the process of being, replaced by ‘intelligent’ machines. The new revolution follows the old question: if robots are taking over jobs, then what and how are humans to do? What kind of social relations are a futuristic vision of the contemporary technological tendencies? Is the fear of precarization and growing inequality as a consequence of the contemporary transformation simply irrational? How will architecture emerge through this transformation?

Understanding that technology is fundamentally a human and social process, the anticipated artistic intervention and sound installation, produced through observation, interviews, readings and audio recordings, aim to be both evidence of this transformation as well as helping us to understand how “the digital turn” has been shaping local labor relations, involving the main protagonists in the city.

Guests:

Konrad Diwold
Head of Smart Factory department
Pro2Future, TU Graz

Peter Fasching
BerufsInfoZentrum
Arbeitsmarktservice Graz-Ost

Mario Matzer
Economic policy department
Arbeiterkammer Steiermark

Christina Simmerer
Curatorial Assistant
Grazer Kunstverein