liquid memories

'paula' & Work

A document on machinic enslavement
in academic capitalism

London South Bank University
2023–2025

artistic labour · academic capitalism · machinic labour · algorithmic governance · technobiography · institutional infrastructures · counter-infrastructural practices

Project unfolding

paula & work is an ongoing artistic research project developed through an embedded period at London South Bank University, during a moment of institutional restructuring and programme closure. Working from within the university, the project treats the academic institution itself as a research site: an algorithmically governed environment where identity, value, and redundancy are produced through documents, metrics, and machinic systems of evaluation.

Rather than approaching the university as a backdrop, paula & work engages it as lived infrastructure — a space where academic labour becomes legible, ranked, and rendered disposable through distributed systems spanning HR platforms, funding models, performance frameworks, and market-oriented governance

Research focus

The project investigates how academic and artistic labour is constructed, measured, and erased under contemporary regimes of institutional governance. It asks how identities are formatted through bureaucratic aesthetics — emails, reports, job titles, strategies, performance categories — and how these documents operate not as neutral representations, but as operative images: tools that actively shape reality.

At its core, paula & work examines machinic enslavement not as a metaphor, but as an everyday condition of working within algorithmic institutions. It explores whether artistic practice can produce counter-infrastructural readings — not merely exposing systems, but misaligning their logics, introducing opacity, friction, and alternative forms of agency and survival.

Methodology: technobiography and counter-infrastructural making

The project unfolds through a practice of technobiography: thinking and working from inside the systems that organise labour, authorship, and value.

This involves:

- extracting and recomposing institutional documents (redundancy communications, strategies, financial and organisational logics) as both evidence and material;

- building speculative institutional models — “as-if” hiring rationales, academic roles, and evaluative scripts — to surface the fictions embedded in governance;

-working with AI as an entangled apparatus, using language models to generate academic titles from a research biography shaped by precarity, and image models trained on the artist’s headshots to produce portraits that mimic institutional representation while destabilising it;

- using installation as a research instrument, staging bureaucratic objects, furniture, screens, and ready-mades so that legibility itself becomes unstable, inviting infrastructural reading through dissonance rather than explanation.

Throughout, the name “paula” functions not as autobiography, but as a variable — a placeholder through which others (artists, researchers, educators, editors) can recognise their own negotiations with systems of work, care, and control.

Production / outcomes

At the centre of the project is AI-centric Curriculum (2024), an installation composed of:

- 90 large-language-model-generated photo-texts and academic titles (A4), including roles such as Director of Pluriversal AI Studies and Head of AI Water Inquiry and Creative Practices;

- the series of AI-generated faculty portraits are displayed on blue felt boards referencing the visual language of university staff displays.

These elements were presented alongside institutional documents, speculative administrative models, classroom interventions (chairs and tablets), archival fragments, and ready-mades, forming a composite document of academic capitalism as lived, machinic infrastructure. The project was accompanied by an artist talk with Teodora Sinziana Alata on AI disruption, education, and technobiography. [ + ]

The research also extends into writing, including ‘paula’ & work: Trying to Build Feminist Counter-Infrastructures in the Algorithmic University (forthcoming in Re-evaluation in Feminism and Contemporary Art, ed. Katy Deepwell, Vernon Press).