'Exhibition: paula' & Work: A Document on the Machinic Enslavement in Academic Capitalism 2023-24
Artwork: paula roush
Location: Borough Road Gallery London UK
Dates: May 8 - 14 2024
Artist's Talk: Ai Disruption: AI, education, technobiography, and the intersection with experimental AI in the works. paula roush and Teodora Sinziana Alata [ + ]
Exhibition zine: download here [+pdf, click & reload the page]
Inspired by the landmark exhibition Women & Work: A Document on the Division of Labour in Industry 1973-75 by Margaret Harrison, Kay Hunt, and Mary Kelly, this project extends these discussions into the realm of academic capitalism. It offers an exploration of identity and technology during a critical time for the arts and humanities in the UK.
In early 2024, following a semester after my sabbatical to work with Generative AI, the university closed the Photography programme at the School of Arts. This decision came amidst the threat of closure facing Arts and Humanities departments at universities across the UK. The artwork produced in this charged political climate addresses the trauma of precarity and the specific trauma around the loss of identity.
By adopting an auto-ethnographic approach, the project crafts academic portraits and texts that together weave a technobiography. This narrative emerges from a blend of algorithmic models, deep archival research, and elements of speculative fiction, providing a reflective narrative on academic capitalism and the personal stories entwined with it.
The exhibition, conceptualized as a publication-installation, unveils data amassed from computers and the internet related to 'paula,' offering an experimental perspective on algorithmic datafication. It ventures into autobiographic fiction, where the corporate strategy of a university is processed through machine learning to narrate 'paula's' life story in the first person.
Included in the installation:
The Death and Life of UK Universities and the Cultural Spaces They Consume
video work by Igea Troiani and Tonia Carless [ + ]
Supported by the London South Bank University (LSBU) Research Sabbatical Scheme for the 2023-24 academic year for an investigation into the colonial roots of the judicial portrait and current applications of artificial intelligence in governance and surveillance.
contact
paula roush ::: paularoush@gmail.com
msdm studio ::: msdm@msdm.org.uk