The transparent factory

As we move into an increasingly digital and automated world, working conditions change, and with them the very idea of work. Throughout the 20th century, the idea of work served as the basis for the development of a growing worker consciousness. In today’s post-Fordist economy, work has become more flexible, precarious and ubiquitous, and often no longer defines us as individuals. The messages we constantly receive on our mobile phones extend the temporal boundaries of work beyond the working day, and even when we relax on a social network or platform, we cannot help but continue to work in an unpaid way, as we create content or generate data that other companies will transform into business profiles, behavioural patterns or training for artificial intelligence tools. 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 process of transformation. While we are used to thinking of video games as a leisure activity, or as a moment of escape, they are increasingly becoming more and more like a complement to the working day, at the same time as work is also progressively adopting game components, reconverted into tools of control. 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 time and work time, between unproductivity and hyperactivity.

This exhibition displays a series of landscapes that question the relationship between video games and work, as well as the value of time and imagination. It also brings us closer to other ways of understanding the moving image, at a time when, on the one hand, images are detached from reality and set sail in the wind of algorithms, while, on the other hand, they are more closely linked than ever to the action of the body and movement, which has become the new blood force that drives the symbolic gears of an activity that we no longer call work.

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.