NL
Exhibition
Exhibition
Part of Don’t be Evil

Unknown Label

Nicolas Gourault

France / Germany 2023
Multi-channel video installation (17:00 minutes) 

It all started with a curious coincidence. In 2018, German car manufacturers, taken aback by the advent of Google and of Tesla, invested a lot of money in research on autonomous vehicles. They gathered an immense amount of data from car sensors that needed to be processed. In that same year, Venezuela was hit by a terrible economic crisis. Thousands of workers lost their jobs, and many of them turned to online micro-working platforms. They ended up annotating the thousands of images being generated from German car manufacturers. 

This multi-channel video installation explores the daily reality of online microworkers from the Global South who annotate images for self-driving cars. The work investigates the power asymmetries and neocolonialist exploitation involved in the human labour necessary to train AI systems. Unknown Label reveals the hidden people that help shape how machines see the world.

This work was realised within the framework of a European Media Art Platform residency program at Werkleitz – Centre for Media Art with support from the Creative Europe Culture Programme of the European Union.

 


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