Ack! Knowledge! Work!

Katherine Behar’s artworks bring automation technologies into visibility, highlighting in particular how such technologies “work” to make work invisible. Motifs of human absence run throughout Behar’s robotic installations, sculptures, and video works and that absence is matched by material footprints of nonhuman over-productivity. The result is an abundance of slippages between knowledge work, white-collar class identification, natural intelligence, artificial intelligence, and office culture. Contrary to the prevailing values we might associate with these subjects, evidence emerges in these intersections that all “autonomous” behavior turns on collective maintenance. This simultaneously opens automation processes to absurdity and humor, and allows robotics to incorporate kinship and care.

Connecting contemporary theory and art, Ack! Knowledge! Work! documents and expands upon Behar’s solo exhibition presented at the Beall Center for Art + Technology(opens in new tab) in southern California. Behar is known as both a conceptual, multimedia artist and a critical theorist, and this volume brings art and theory together with plates from the exhibition, essays by well-known scholars of new media and computing Kris Paulsen, Jennifer Rhee, and Scott Richmond, and short texts by Behar, curator Jesse Colin Jackson, and creative technologist Fee Christoph, all of which illuminate the predominant theme of the exhibition: the interplay between automation, AI, labor, robotics, and technology in the still-human workspace, with an emphasis on collaborating with technology rather vying against it in a “race for the bottom.”