Saturday 21. October. System Haunting: multi-sited workers’ inquiry in the platform age. Encounter with Benjamin Gerdes

Dates: Saturday, October  21st

Time: 19:00-21:00

The encounter with Benjamin Gerdes is part of his artistic research project, Ghost Platform: Generating the “Complex Image” of Data, Labour, and Logistics, engages in questions of invisible labour in the contemporary circulation of materials and information, particularly the conditions under which this is popularly experienced in the Global North. The phenomenon of the digital platform, as a mechanism of extraction, communication, aestheticization, and spatial and social reorganization, occupies one focus of the project. This research examines the possibilities of repurposing related tools toward more equitable outcomes. This project convenes a study circle of logistics workers and artistic researchers to co-design a software tool: a ghost platform. It pursues a complex image combining sound, image, text and virtual elements with discussion of these obscured perspectives.

BIO

Benjamin Gerdes is an artist, writer, researcher, and organizer working primarily in video and related public formats. He is interested in intersections of radical politics, knowledge production, and popular imagination. His work focuses on the affective and social consequences of economic and state regimes, investigating methods for art and cultural projects to contribute to social change. His individual and collaborative projects emerge via long-term research processes in dialogue with activists, trade unionists, architects, and geographers, among others, including many years as a co-organizer of the group and space 16 Beaver Group in Lower Manhattan. Exhibitions and screenings include: The Centre Pompidou, National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.), New Museum (New York), Rotterdam International Film Festival, Museum of the Moving Image (New York), Gothenburg International Biennial of Contemporary Art, Venice Architecture Biennale, and the Tate Modern. After two decades in New York City, he is presently based in Stockholm at the Royal Institute of Art, where he directs the Swedish Research Council-funded artistic research project Ghost Platform. In addition, he maintains an ongoing research affiliation with the Department of Visual Culture at the Technical University of Vienna.

No RSVP required

Event held onsite: Donaustr. 84, 12043 Berlin