Exhibition view showing AI-centric Curriculum (ninety machine learning-generated portraits and job titles, ten ready-made blue pin boards 120x930x1cm) and St George’s Quarter Development (ready-made architectural model, an academic building for Borough Road, by Wilkinson Eyre Architects and two school chairs, 77x197x88cm). From 'paula' & Work: A Document on the Machinic Enslavement in Academic Capitalism 2023-24,' Borough Road Gallery, London May 2024.
'paula' & Work: A Document on the Machinic Enslavement in Academic Capitalism 2023-2024
author: paula roush
installation: AI-generated portraits, video, university documents, financial reports, speculative models, academic furniture, archival materials and ready-mades.
gallery: borough road gallery, london, uk
date: may 2024
artist talk: paula roush and teodora sinziana alata. ai disruption: ai, education, technobiography, and the intersection with experimental ai in the works.
description:
paula & work is an installation that explores the entanglements between institutional legibility, machinic governance, and the aesthetics of academic labour. developed in the aftermath of the closure of the photography programme at london south bank university, and in the context of broader restructurings within UK higher education, the work investigates how academic identity is produced, classified, and rendered redundant within algorithmic systems of value extraction.
at the centre of the installation is ai-centric curriculum (2024), a series of speculative faculty portraits generated in collaboration with an AI image model. based on ninety invented academic titles—such as “director of pluriversal ai studies” and “head of ai water inquiry and creative practices”—the portraits were printed and displayed on blue felt boards, echoing the visual language of institutional display. the titles themselves were composed through prompting an AI text model with my research biography and job market precarity.
juxtaposed with internal university documents—redundancy emails, speculative hiring rationales, financial strategies—and spatial interventions including classroom chairs with tablets, paula & work misaligns the bureaucratic aesthetics of academic governance. rather than simply exposing institutional processes, the exhibition renders their logics unstable, offering space for what anthropologists call counter-infrastructural readings: gestures that distort, repurpose, and reimagine the institutional scripts of labour.
also included in the installation:
the death and life of UK universities and the cultural spaces they consume
video work and essay by igea troiani and tonia carless [ + ]
supported by:
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.
Exhibition view showing Individual Consultation Meeting (paula Lip Sync) AI-generated lip sync video, 8:21, colour, sound Wall projection, 133x146cm. The Performance of Schooling (Ten classroom chairs with lily pads(writing tablets) with documents, metal clips, pencils, 67x520x82cm. Academic Board 2010 (Ready-made four ballot boxes for the election of the Academic Board,220x33x32.5cm. From 'paula' & Work: A Document on the Machinic Enslavement in Academic Capitalism 2023-24, Borough Road Gallery, London May 2024.
Exhibition view showing Individual Consultation Meeting (paula Lip Sync) AI-generated lip sync video, 8:21, colour, sound Wall projection, 133x146cm. The Performance of Schooling (Ten classroom chairs with lily pads(writing tablets) with documents, metal clips, pencils, 67x520x82cm. From 'paula' & Work: A Document on the Machinic Enslavement in Academic Capitalism 2023-24, Borough Road Gallery, London May 2024.
Exhibition view showing detail of AI-centric Curriculum (ninety machine learning-generated portraits and job titles, ten ready-made blue pin boards 120x930x1cm). From 'paula' & Work: A Document on the Machinic Enslavement in Academic Capitalism 2023-24, Borough Road Gallery, London May 2024.
Exhibition view showing detail of AI-centric Curriculum (ninety machine learning-generated portraits and job titles, ten ready-made blue pin boards 120x930x1cm). From 'paula' & Work: A Document on the Machinic Enslavement in Academic Capitalism 2023-24, Borough Road Gallery, London May 2024.
Exhibition view showing AI-centric Curriculum (ninety machine learning-generated portraits and job titles, ten ready-made blue pin boards 120x930x1cm) and St George’s Quarter Development (ready-made architectural model, an academic building for Borough Road, by Wilkinson Eyre Architects and two school chairs, 77x197x88cm). End of the World is AI (found newspaper, 30x18x1cm Displayed on a wood plinth, 100x58x48cm).The Performance of Schooling (Ten classroom chairs with lily pads(writing tablets) with documents, metal clips, pencils, 67x520x82cm. Perception Machine (Demise of Photography?) Four Perspex screens, 178x100x43cm Five Perspex plinths, 120/100x30x30cm One darkroom enlarger, 65x45x45cm One electroscope, 38x37x57cm Darkroom equipment: trays, chemistry, film, 42x32x27cm One bouquet of flowers (gift from second-year Photography students), in a kettle with water, 54x50x36cm One microscope, 42x42x28cm 186x202x101cm. From 'paula' & Work: A Document on the Machinic Enslavement in Academic Capitalism 2023-24,' Borough Road Gallery, London May 2024.
Installation view of paula roush, 'paula' & Work: A Document on the Machinic Enslavement in Academic Capitalism 2023-24, Borough Road Gallery London UK (May 8 - 14, 2024).
Exhibition zine
16 pages b&w, booklet design by paula roush
download here [+pdf]
contact
paula roush ::: paularoush@gmail.com
msdm studio ::: msdm@msdm.org.uk