Re-Scaling Labour: From Gilbreth’s Motion Efficiency Study to Harun Farocki’s Operational Images
In the present text, I would like to trace the shift from Gilbreth’s motion efficiency study, which made it possible to visualize the almost infinitesimal sequences from which movement is composed, by performing a differential analysis of the individual phases and rasterizing them into individual fr...
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| In: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/interfaces, |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Language: | Anglais |
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Interfaces
2024
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Summary: | In the present text, I would like to trace the shift from Gilbreth’s motion efficiency study, which made it possible to visualize the almost infinitesimal sequences from which movement is composed, by performing a differential analysis of the individual phases and rasterizing them into individual frames, to Harun Farocki’s commentary on the contemporary organization of labour as determined by operational and control imagery based on digital simulations. From Gilbreth to Farocki, we can trace the transformation of cultural techniques and practices as well as changes in the realm of technology reshaping and re-scaling labour and the man-machine relationship. Where Gilbreth aims to develop and improve the recordings of workers’ movement to better measure the “fair day wage,” and thus smoothen the production of the capitalistic machine, Farocki deconstructs the contemporary digital postcapitalist sphere of invisible labour in multiple ways. Farocki highlights how labour has become flattened but also how every move is an actualized differential simulacrum of the multiplicity of virtualities of movement. He analyses how labour has become transposed by the eye of the machine in the form of a digital image readable by other machines. But for both, the parcellation of individual moments depends on what might be called a technological a priori: at what scales a moment is made apparent and thus explorable depends on the possibilities of the apparatus. |
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