Working for Tangible Response
Categories: 9-5 Tangible Response
Tangible Response is one of the UK’s most rewarding brand-responsive agencies. They allowed me to come to their office and use data from their local computer network for a representation of an average working day at Tangible Response. Thanks to Sarah B. who runs MEANTIME an art space in Cheltenham UK. She made it all possible.
The vehicle was placed on painted 5ft x 3ft board.
The computer grabs all available data from the local network, for example UDP packets which printers and file servers send when they are avilable or data from a local proxy server. This data is send to the vehicle. The vehicle uses the received data for a choreography of its movements. It is equipped with a spiky metal pin with which it is scratching the painted surface.
After 8 hours of work the drawing represents an average working day at the office of Tangible Response.
The drawing was sold to Tangible Response. I received £5.73 per hour, which is the minimum wage in the UK plus £75.00 material costs.
the basic notion of immaterial labour is that the manipulation of information, but also the interplay of affects, have become central in the contemporary working process even in the factories, but much more so in the many forms of language-, image-and ambiance-production. Workers can no longer be treated like Taylorist gorillas, exploited for their purely physical force; the ‘‘spirit of the worker” has to come down onto the factory floor, and from there it can gain further autonomy by escaping into the flexible work situations developing on the urban territory.