Workers out of office: Dreaming ABout Work
2023 digital game & installation
2023 digital game & installation
Workers Out of Office immerses players on the outskirts of a simulated city in a near-future setting, where they assume control of a group of former corporate employees displaced by automation. In this situation, they contemplate their individual futures, searching for new models of emancipation and meaningful survival in a post-work society, navigating poor material conditions and a deteriorating climate while striving to preserve their collective well-being. They must find new positions in society, political stances, and an agenda. The game's objective is to allow the player to speculate about a future that encompasses both emancipation and, in the bad scenario, the potential dystopia of planetary extinction. To speculate means to employ a critical awareness of one's own (perhaps limited but existing) possibilities for engaging in political struggles in a reality beyond the game.
Workers Out of Office - Dreaming About Work draws on game mechanics from RPG adventure games, and TTRPGs to construct a collective world shaped by interviews with its participants. Its world simulates a new, collective rethinking of alternatives to capitalist exchange in the face of emerging automation and the climate crisis. Players and workers can assume the roles of researchers, delving into the realm of future politics, or succumb to the illusion of being re-employed in an automated society. Alternatively, they can find themselves grappling with the challenge of survival in a fictional breakdown of the welfare state. The game strives to create an intimate interface that allows speculation about positive futures.
Installation at Industra Brnohttps://industra.space/program/workers-out-of-office-dreaming-about-work
Dreaming About Work 0.9: For Loop Contingency
2021 digital game/simulation, Installation, Full-HD Video
GPT-2 quote: “We work in a culture where the workplace is a battlefield. The most basic human activity, whether it's walking a long way to work, cooking a meal or even looking at a product, requires the interaction with someone outside of oneself. As much as it hurts to say, automation is also the way we live.”
The present is at the same time recursive, biological and cybernetic. The office is being replaced by digital logic, feedback and recursion erases the distance between employees. Social reality thus creates discontinued battlefields of workspaces, on which it shortens its feedbacks. In parallel technological reality creates soft boundaries of control, expressed by desire and pain, which slowly displaces hard boundaries of physical space.
Dreaming about work 0.9 explores the dromena of work and repetitive activity, closely connected with automation of work and forms of loss of one's own individuality during the labour process. Dreaming about work focuses on the mechanics influencing our ethical values and their relationship to human resource programming and our social environment.
Game simulation places the viewer/player into the role of office manager; she has the duty to control work of other employees, but also to manage her own time properly: To maintain workers performance while keeping the production norm which is not sustainable in the long run as the employees are slowly getting replaced by algorithms. The algorithm of the digital office extends the thesis of the game by a moral dilemma within the game interactions, the game allegory of control becomes a critique of contemporary alienated work. The player decides whether to keep the work loop, whether to send an unproductive employee home, when to have a break, or when to replace human workers with fully-automated machines. The game loop works with explicit boredom, anxiety and alienation of the workspace.
Installation at TIC Brno, Soundtrack by Václav Janoščík, programming by Filip Hauer and Michal Žák.
Dreaming About Work 0.1
2020 4k video 07:54, Computer simulation
2020 4k video 07:54, Computer simulation
Dreaming about work 0.1 is a critical speculation about the future of work, the working day and the loss of individual perception in the work process. The centre of Dreaming About Work is a video showing text generated by a publicly available machine learning algorithm. The source sentence for the generated text was: "What if algorithms take our jobs?" - What if the algorithms take our work?
The video serves as an introduction for an interactive game - Job Quitting Simulator, which speculates on the future of work in a world fully controlled by algorithms. It is an allegory of the algorithmic perception of the society of work. The game is spread between 8 hours of a standard working day. The player performs a repetitive task during the time: rewriting the displayed text or agreeing to the entered statement. The simulation is a subversion of the common social positive perception of work. The "allegorithmic" dream of work draws attention to the currently problematic concepts of the working day and the loss of individual perception of the world within the mechanically repeated work activity.
The simulation of quitting work is a personal layer of the speculative problem of the future of work in the automated world. "What if algorithms take our work?" - is a simple political question that automatically arises in a close encounter with advanced machine learning. Algorithms appear here as xeno-players with their own program and motivation. The prints of speculative diagrams of traditional, future and fully automated work combine the personal and political contexts of dreaming about work.
Neural Network Death Song I.
2019 4K Video
2019 4K Video
The danger is currently spectacular threats and economic uncertainty, publicised and depersonalised by PR agencies. Danger, as a political utility, is used, among other things, by conservative forces to attack environmental activists or to reduce emissions. The publicised danger in this case is a special mix of denying the acute impact of climate change and artificially created fear of preserving obsolete means of production (fossil fuels, internal combustion engines, ..). The whole discourse ends in a dystopian fear of the future after capitalism - which itself carries out suicide by aggressive disregard for nature. The publicised danger lies mainly in the loss of social status, labour and financial execution. The physical threat is shifted to an unclear abstract level in media coverage.
Neural Network Death Song is based on the text section above. "Let's bow to the impersonal market forces, respect the abstract rule of respect for property rights." The initial quote is a total denial of the living world in favour of the ideological construct of ruthless capitalism.
The songs of death appear in various folk traditions as a combat threat or as a contemplative premortal song. In 2002, Klaus legitimised the ongoing rape of nature, which continues to this day, until 2019 when glaciers in Greenland melt and humanity is on the verge of losing its natural environment. Another threat is the advent of artificial intelligence and neural networks, which already define our daily lives. Neural networks are becoming the main instrument of corporate power, and in the public debate about them, we are still in a phase of denial, like the climate crisis. The danger becomes real in collecting data about our behaviour on the network or when the algorithm decides to dismiss us because of reduced performance.
The video combines generated neural network text (based on V.Klaus quote) with synthesised voice and still of a tree in rain. The climate crisis, conservative texts, or neural networks are a real threat to our body.
Little Xeno-Chemistry:
(If The Bot Was a Socialist)
//Když by byl bot socialista
2018 - Simulation (C # in Unity)
(If The Bot Was a Socialist)
//Když by byl bot socialista
2018 - Simulation (C # in Unity)
The LX-Ch has two parallel layers. The first layer is appropriation / modification of the text Civilisation at the Crossroads (R. Richta et al 1966), with a high occurrence of the word "society", which I replaced with string "Artificial Intelligence", thereby creating an uncanny dehumanising atmosphere. Human is still present in the text, but the goal is the development of the machine.
Given the time of the Civilisation at the Crossroads (1966), the book shows typical links about the development of socialist society, replaced by socialist artificial intelligence. Thus, not only is the text updated, today's technological and social debate, but also the subversive question after the process of dehumanisation. The question of what happens if we discard society completely from discourse about human and civilisation.
The second layer of LX-Ch is a reference to generated gaming environments. Where we generate our own map of the world (Civilisation, Heroes of Might and Magic, Age of Empires, etc..). Two screens count the generation of the world and the generation of society. The number is infinitely approaching 100% over time, according to the hyperbolic function: where x are seconds. The image is created in c # in the Unity engine. Conceptually, I chose an image that is live, created with the help of the game engine, but completely removes the viewer's interaction or input.
Perfect Strike: After Vita Activa 2018
Computer Game installation
4k Video 40:00
Do you ever imagine a world without your body? Perfect Strike is game about work, a cognitive test of the future. Nowadays, like in games, objects become their own goal for which we create ours tools and equipment. The game mechanic is a series of questions freely based on the Hannah Arendt's Human Condition.
Sugar - Hydroxylamine 2017
4K Video installation 06:26
Sugar, mattress, fan, video, space.
Perfect Time 2017
Slow-motion HD video 15:17
Family car ride; audio from racing computer game Dirt Rally; sentences from Swann‘s way containing words road or ride
Spend Your Day Right 2016
2 Channel Hd Video 06:23
Re Time 2016
Full HD Video 03:19
Mediated Time 2016
Installation
Installation
Dear,
Put on the headphones. Close your eyes and walk slowly up and down the stairs.
Count one hundred steps.
Hidden microphone reproduces the ambient sound of stairs.
Melting Butter & Sustainable Time 2016
Full HD Video 11:16, 04:04
Untitled (In the Studio) 2016
Ai WeiWei replica. Webpage on tumblr.com. You can access this page only from this print.
Some of my Friends are Killers 2016
Full Hd video 38 min
Six takes of my friends, playing military simulation Arma. I have made three different game scenarios derived from my idea of battle. Each take ends with death of a friend.
Rooms / Pokoje 2015
Installation is composed of spatial drawing of archetypal room (Iron construction in dimensions 400 cm x 220 cm x 220 cm), video screened on tow canvas and three channel audio with ambient takes from six rooms of mine friends, six interviews and ambient take from my window.
Video is a collage of takes of the rooms where six of my friends live in, it is composed to form abstract labyrinth which resembles archetypal house. In the interviews I asked several questions about the place in the private rooms, where my friends stay most of the time. The answers form only orientation in the space and time of the installation. Answers go mostly like this: „I stay mainly in my bed. .. It‘s natural place to be.“ or „I may, I may have no specified place...“
Orientation is shattered by asynchronous time (audio in the headphones, video projected on canvas). The viewer is forced to thread his own story and spatial concept of the house. All the articles in the single rooms have a strong personal context connected with their hidden residents.
http://filiphauer.blogspot.com/2015/08/rooms-pokoje.html
Taking a Short Nap 2014
Installation composed of sound and video. Taking a Short Nap thematizes direct emotional experience of the viewer. Viewer climbs on two wooden stairs spaced along the wall, from whom he listens to the sound takes played from headphones above the stairs.
http://filiphauer.blogspot.com/2014/07/kratka-prestavka-taking-short-nap.html
Formální zahrada / Formal Garden 2014
Installation composed from a tree, chipboard desk and a web blog.
I wanted to capture the process of killing a tree, I have captured the process from the moment the tree was lying at my studio, thru it was cut and to the final installation. Finally I had placed the tree into chipboard desk in a horizontal position. Chipboard desk stands in vertical position in space. QR code links to online blog, which captures the process of my work.
Formal Garden refers to the concept of French Formal gardens form 17. century. Formal Garden itself should be seen as an formal artwork.
http://formal-garden.tumblr.com/
Some Of My Friends Talking About Art 2014
Full HD Video 43:31
Three channel video installation. Six takes of interviews with my friends (approx. 7 minute each). We were individually talking about basic questions connected with art practice.
IMPORT/EXPORT (Monolity A, B) 2013
„ This term export derives from the conceptual meaning as to ship the goods and services out of
the port of a country. „
the port of a country. „
„ Import is derived from the conceptual meaning as the goods and services into the port of a
country. „ Wikipedia
country. „ Wikipedia
Monoliths A and B: Inner construction of two monoliths is made from two polystyren blocks EPS 70 F - 250 mm, dimensions polystyren blocks 500 x 1000 mm.
Ulysses 2012
Digital collage
Dance 2011
Digital photography
