Mediations on a Digital Workforce

Abstract

The work presented here ranges from small-scale interventions on Amazon.com ’s Mechanical Turk virtual crowdsourcing job board to collaborations with the Turkers (workers) for exhibition and festival play. Virtual job boards have a tendency to commodify digital labor, often resulting in exploitative practices. In these works, the author offers the Turkers a reprieve from the tensions between play and labor (play/bor) with an opportunity to express themselves while being paid for their creativity.