The transparent factory

One of the first shots in the history of cinema is the exit from a factory. Shot in 1895 by the Lumière brothers in front of their own photographic apparatus factory, the famous sequence shows us how the workers cease to be a homogeneous group and become a dispersed multitude.

As we move into an increasingly digital world, work becomes ever more flexible, precarious and ubiquitous, and often no longer defines us as individuals. Even during our leisure time we continue to work unpaid, generating content or data. In the transparent factory, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish when we are in and when we are out.

Video games are particularly shifting sands in this transformation process. While we tend to think of them as a leisure activity, video games are increasingly becoming more and more like a complement to the working day. Short games, simple rules, repetitive routines and a meticulously calibrated balance between gratification and frustration are the ingredients of a new digital ergonomics that conquers screens and blurs the boundaries between leisure and work time, between unproductivity and hyperactivity.

This exhibition, which takes as its title the homonymous research by the Mataró artist Octavi Comeron (1965-2013) on art and postfordism, questions the relationship between video games and work, as well as the value of time and imagination, at a time when our body drives the symbolic gears of an activity that we no longer call work.

Quan sortim de l’institut s’encenen els llums de Marc Villanueva Mir

Video, 13 minutes. 2024.

Behind an appearance of freedom and fantasy, video games hide routines, tasks, repetitive work and waiting situations, which are not very different from the dynamics of everyday work. And like any working day, hours of dedication are rewarded, whether with coins, scores, gems or candy, offering a fleeting sense of gratification before starting again the next day. These students from the Maria Espinalt Secondary School in Barcelona tell us about their experiences as workers in the virtual universe of video games, where they enter every day when they leave class. Their perspective makes the difference between playing and working completely ambiguous, and reveals the profound existence of capitalist logics in the digitalisation of leisure time.

This video is an extension of the curatorial text, and arises from the project EN Residencia for the academic year 2020-2021, a programme of the Institut de Cultura de Barcelona and the Consorci d’Educació de Barcelona, with the mediation of the Teatre Lliure.

Factory diary by Marta Azparren

Object, audiovisual and sound installation. 2020-24.

In audiovisual language, a loop is an action that ends at the same point where it begins. The gesture of assembly line assembly, to be efficient and productive, has to be carried out with the same premises. Factory diary recovers the bodily memory of the workers in a textile factory and connects it with the new meanings of leisure and work.

In the central piece of this exhibition, the artist copies the gesture that two former textile workers have shared with her, and transfers it repeatedly to a steel plate, creating an accumulative engraving where the trace of the mechanised gesture becomes physical and audible. The same gesture separated by the Mediterranean which, after fifty years, is still the same. It is accompanied by the gloves used to make the engraving, a clocking machine where the duration of the action has been recorded and a projection on a Francoist ergonomic notebook that shows the devastating trace that work tools leave on bodies.

Proletarian Laboratory by Roc Parés

Interactive multimedia installation. 2024.

The assembly line is at the centre of the Fordist factory, but also of this video game where we have no choice but to run desperately in a single direction. In a famous scene from Modern Times, Charles Chaplin is forced to work compulsively on an assembly line, until he loses control of his body and is engulfed by the machine itself. Possessed by the choreography of work, Chaplin absorbs the factory into himself.

Reversing the tendency of technology to miniaturise and become invisible, this proposal by Roc Parés expands the game interface and demands the full attention of our body to guide the video game character, while a computer vision algorithm draws our gestures on the wall: a visual echo that shows us how our online behaviour is continuously monitored and analysed.

On wasting time by Raquel Friera

Audiovisual installation, 8 hours. 2007.

In 2007, Raquel Friera hired an actor to ‘waste time’ for eight hours, the time interval corresponding to a working day in Spain. Throughout these eight hours, the actor dedicated himself to representing what is understood by the expression ‘wasting time’, according to the results obtained by the artist through a survey carried out among the citizens of Barcelona.

The piece takes the form of an eight-hour video, projected in a room with pillows where the spectator is invited to sit and observe. In the image, a clock marks the remaining filming time, so that whoever wants to watch the whole video can decide whether he or she is in a position to double this time-wasting situation with his or her presence.

Marta Azparren moves between experimental film, live art and drawing. His work reflects on artistic activity, with a special focus on the connections between creator, spectator, work of art and exhibition context. His audiovisual proposals go beyond the conventional frameworks of the image to project themselves in practices such as expanded cinema, live editing, spoken cinema and video installation. His work has been screened and awarded at numerous international film and video festivals, exhibitions and art fairs. He has recently published the essay Cine ciego. Detener el flujo de las imágenes.

Raquel Friera has been obsessed, since her first pieces, with time as a tool of political control. Throughout her artistic career, she has questioned the loss of time, free time, waiting time, care time, maternity time and chronormativity as a temporal regime of power. She has exhibited in spaces such as the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, CentroCentro (Madrid), MUSAC (León), Casal Solleric (Mallorca), Fundación Tàpies, Galería ADN Platform, La Capella or La Virreina (Barcelona), as well as La Compagnie (Marseille), Projektraum LS43 (Berlin) or MUAC (Mexico).

Roc Parés defines himself as a research artist in interactive communication. His artistic works are characterised by poetic and critical experimentation with new technologies, shunning technosolutionist approaches and opting instead to observe how we communicate with these technologies. Since 1995, he has been a lecturer and researcher in the Department of Communication at the UPF. He has presented his work in venues such as the CCCB, the Joan Miró Foundation, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid), the Tate Gallery (London), the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Spanish Cultural Centre in Mexico, among many others.

Marc Villanueva Mir develops his artistic activity in the field of the performing arts, understood in a broad sense. He is particularly interested in the idea of play and its possibilities for artistic research, as well as in the performativity of science, literature and digital technologies. She has presented her projects in contexts such as the TNT Festival (Terrassa), the Fasto Forward Festival (Dresden) or the Schaubude (Berlin), and has been resident artist in spaces such as the Santa Mònica arts centre, the Free Theatre or the Frankfurt LAB.