A fight for better working conditions and worker satisfaction in greenhouses as testbeds of automation-centered ecosystems needs to reckon with the specificity of these environments where “what gets counted counts”. The Archive of In-Operables aims to address these challenges using a data feminist approach – by re-analyzing so-called operational images, which normally support the optimization of production, for traces of disruption, pause, rest, mistake, biological rhythms, and machine dysfunction. In this way, we create the category of the tired worker, the broken trolley, the overgrown tomato, or the disobedient bumble bee.
Image courtesy of the artist
Image courtesy of the artist
Image courtesy of the artist
Image courtesy of the artist
Image courtesy of the artist
Instead of becoming a ledger of inefficiency to be dealt with amidst the race-to-the-bottom, the resulting archive is there to be mined for narratives of other-than-market necessities, all in a modality suited to interface with calculating systems. The final outcome will be an artwork of authentic operational images presented in a time series (videos), alongside corresponding stories of workers from their perspectives. In that way, the reclassified “anomalies” are presented in the context of the complex and nuanced experience of greenhouse labor.
As data undergirds horticultural systems, human, machine, and plant labor are organized via digital operations, which set the bounds of activities in the actor-network of the greenhouse. What is getting counted, and what counts?
Špela Petrič
Jury Statement
Archive of In-Operables brings Petrič ‘s expertise in merging scientific and artistic exploration with plants, horticulture, and AI. Her experience on “Performative Ethnographies” and feminist perspectives on data collection, have allied her to investigate the cognitive aspects of machine learning in agriculture, directly engaging with field workers and addressing Waag’s focus on integrating technology with natural systems in a socially and ecologically conscious manner. The Archive of In-Operables explores simultaneously the affordances of the technologies and the needs and concerns of human, machine and more-than-human subjects involved in horticulture.
Waag Futurelab
Špela Petrič (SI/NL)
Špela Petrič is a Slovenian new media artist with a background in the natural sciences. Her artistic practice combines biomedia practices and performativity to enact strange relations between bodies that reveal the underpinnings of our (bio)technological societies and propose alternatives. Petrič has received several awards, such as the White Aphroid for outstanding artistic achievement (Slovenia), the Bioart and Design Award (Netherlands), and an Award of Distinction at Prix Ars Electronica (Austria).