June 7th, 2010 - Project Overview
There is a company based in Bangalore, India, called “Get Friday.” It has “managed to take global outsourcing, which was previously meant for Fortune 500 businesses, within the reach of ordinary people – an individual, an entrepreneur, or a small business owner.” Get Friday typically provides remote executive support, wherein a largely American client base is assigned a “virtual” personal assistant. I am a part of that client base, paying monthly fees for an assistant who works out of the Get Friday office in India.
My assistant is a 24-year-old male Bangalore resident named Akhil. In paying for our relationship I am not attempting to lighten my work load, but rather to engage in creative collaborative projects and even reversals of the normative outsourcing flow. In its growth and expansion, my relationship with Akhil is resulting in a visual dialogical consciousness that is further manifested and trackable in the work we create for and with each other.
Akhil assigned me a task in which I would make a video about the best fighter jet in the world. While keeping true to Akhil’s interest in and knowledge of fighter jets, the video I am working on takes the Lockheed Martin/Boeing F-22 Raptor as a starting point in a network of associated histories, relationships, and concepts.
The F-22 Raptor opens into a discussion of the centralized military state, while my relationship with Akhil opens into a discussion of the globally networked neoliberal economy. These two intertwined paradigms are approached in a nonlinear history that feeds forward and backward to cybernetics and the emergence of digital computing to consider their influence on both the jet and the technosocial conditions for my relationship with Akhil. The video includes movements through contemporary military trade and entertainment, the commercial internet, and the militarized family histories of Akhil and I.
Most source material for the video comes from “between” Akhil and I, in that it has been pulled from the internet – official military footage, corporate promotional videos, economic data visualizations, 2D and 3D animation sequences, movie trailers, and more. The rest of the material, such as family home movies and our recorded actions, is now shared via email and web uploads. The video’s flow of material reveals an intensively researched database of sound, image, and text. The normally static and “objective” form of the database becomes dynamic and subjective in this database-narrative. This hybrid aesthetic takes cues from the lived experience of being online – spatial montage, web design tropes, maximal space-time compression, contextual advertising – though a critical distance is created by framing the content as matters of common concern rather than highly individualized electronic signals.
Here’s a start :
To see what else Akhil and I have been up to, please visit http://www.andrewnormanwilson.com/
Susan (June 9th, 2010 at 1:37 am)
Thought-provoking project, but I have questions. From your description, it is not clear whether Akhil is cognizant of you true, creative project, or if he thinks you are in fact part of a corporate environment. I would like to know more, as you mention you are using the “militarized family” history of Akhil (?). Is the focus the online, negotiated “flow of material” that ended in the video, or is it the relationship with Akhil? Is Akhil’s response part of the project (and is it ongoing)? And where do you see this project going from here?
res008 (June 9th, 2010 at 4:16 am)
Hello Susan,
Thanks for the questions. Akhil and I have been working together for over a year now, and he has been aware my intentions since the beginning. We started off with more conventional tasks (in terms of both content and flow), and eventually moved to collaborations and these quasi-reversals such as the video task. I think it’s also important to mention that I’m drawn to situations that I am uncomfortable being a part of, allowing an interplay of critique, imaginative hope, and social action to unfold.
To give you an idea of what else Akhil and I have accomplished together and in relation to each other, check out Virtual Assistance on my website – http://www.andrewnormanwilson.com/portfolios/35581-virtual-assistance
I conducted interviews with Akhil and his father, who just retired after years of service as an accountant at the Defense Controller. This is one version of Akhil’s militarized family history. The focus of the video includes the F22 Raptor, Akhil’s family history, my family history, particulars of the military-industrial-academic-entertainment complex, and particulars of the globally networked neoliberal economy. The online material that ends up in the video as well as my relationship with Akhil are, in certain ways, results of these intertwined histories. There is dense tissue connecting all of these things. The video sets these histories in motion to as a way to not only talk about the F22 Raptor, but also my relationship with Akhil, both implicitly and explicitly. As it is an essay video, it is multi-dimensional and difficult to summarize. Just trust (or hope) that I will keep it all together.
One place the project is headed is into an exhibition space, where all of our work can be shown in a manner I am calling the “anomalous office aesthetic.” Another place it has ended up is friendship, albeit an odd and problematic one.
Michael Demers (June 11th, 2010 at 12:27 pm)
Andrew — I’m excited by the scope of this project, as well as the personal histories in what is rarely thought of in personal terms (the military industrial complex). I think Susan’s questions are important ones, and I wonder if you can’t make your answers to her questions more apparent in the work itself (unless you are planning on including massive text documents in the exhibition, which pose their own barriers for the audience).
I don’t find myself questioning what Akhil’s relationship is to this project, and in many ways I look at him as being the entry point for something larger than both of you. I don’t know if this is what you are aiming for, though I find myself interested in the personal histories within the military context. The way the work has been presented so far, I’m not sure that Akhil has to be under your employ — I wonder if the project would benefit just as much from asking other people for their personal histories. I know your statement references the importance of the relationship you have with Akhil (a monetary one), but do you see that becoming more clear with some of the other work in the exhibition?
res008 (June 12th, 2010 at 9:22 pm)
Hi Michael – Thanks for the questions and challenges. For the exhibition of all the work, I think that showing the boat that Akhil designed for me to build, then video documentation of the him floating the boat, plus an exhibition version I built of the boat inside a water cooler, plus a pulse rate chart, plus the cubicle reconfiguration documentation and process, plus other work we have done will address Susan’s questions and a number of the other ones that have come up here in the Arts Lab. I think some introductory text will be necessary – but nothing more than what’s found here. There will also be official Get Friday documents on display – like my monthly receipts and assistant ratings. The most ideal situation for exhibiting all the work is in vacant office space where I can “work” the exhibition from 9-5, serving as a sort of corporate representative. So I will be available for all these questions, and Akhil and I will be considering ways for him to be telepresent once the time comes.
Though Akhil is technically not under my employ, if I were not his client through the Get Friday system I wouldn’t be making a video about fighter jets and their relations to the intertwined paradigms of development that have led to the contemporary military-industrial-academic-entertainment complex and the globally networked neoliberal economy. Though the video is not a documentary of my overall relationship to Akhil, fragments of our economic relations will be presented, in addition to their presentation in the exhibition.
I have read that De Landa text – really informative. I’m going to post a list of texts I’m drawing from soon, and ask for further recommendations.
Greg J. Smith (June 9th, 2010 at 2:44 pm)
Hi Andrew,
This is a really provocative project, I just got drawn into your archives on your site and impressed with the variety of material you have amassed. This project could easily descend into moralizing or cynicism but I think you’ve struck just the right tone between sincerity and exploration — your relationship with Akhil definitely comes across as a genuine (and odd) collaboration. I think there is a lot of possibility in videos like More Than Meets the Eye, I appreciate how that facet of the project employs a mutual interest as a means to tie your lives together. To step back from the content, I really appreciate the video from a production standpoint — your delivery of autobiographical information kind of reminds me of the deadpan narration of The Pinky Show.
Have you determined what your next step is?
res008 (June 10th, 2010 at 7:07 pm)
Greg – Thanks! The next step is to finish working on a number of sections that will illustrate the themes and events I find pertinent and interesting. These include cybernetics, Norbert Weiner’s servomechanism, ARPANET, corporate strategy implemented through technology, space-time compression, the military-entertainment complex (movies and video games), contemporary military trade, Akhil’s family military history, and more.
I’d really like for it to eventually be screened in the Get Friday office.
Michael Demers (June 11th, 2010 at 12:31 pm)
Have you read Manuel De Landa’s War in the Age of Intelligent Machines?
Greg J. Smith (June 24th, 2010 at 4:18 pm)
Michael – Just out of curiosity, what facet of War in the Age
of Intelligent of Machines do you think is relevant here?
Michael Demers (June 25th, 2010 at 4:33 pm)
I was thinking about the relationship between the social and the
technological, specifically as they relate to the military… Not
that there is a direct relationship between the text and this
work, but they both posit the social as a prime point of entry
for a discussion of military projects.
Greg J. Smith (June 26th, 2010 at 3:27 pm)
Ok, I hear you Michael. This mini-exchange just inspired me to
pick the text up again and I opened it on a passage how the sound
barrier is a singularity and how it will inevitably cause a jet
that can not withstand it to crash. This reminds me of the
atmosphere of (potential) catastrophe that hangs over the above
video.
Harold Schellinx (June 10th, 2010 at 9:18 am)
I am pleasantly surprised to come across this fascinating project here at TINT Arts Lab, which is quite stunning in the range and depth of problems and questions that it touches upon. Like Susan, I would like to have a clearer idea about Akhil’s current position, which – I presume – will continue to change over time. Does Akhil know and visit your proejct’s website, this residency’s site? Does he read and comment upon your ‘meta-writings’ on your working relationship? Or is he only concerned with and involved in the ‘work per se’?
Also, is there anything precise you intend to accomplish in the context of this specific TINT residency? Or does it simply enter into ‘the flow’ of your ongoing work?
res008 (June 10th, 2010 at 7:47 pm)
Harold – Thanks! Akhil has visited my website, provides feedback on my video, is informed of when I am giving lectures/presentations on the project, etc. The exhibition I am planning is not a solo show – it is also an exhibition of Akhil’s work and our work together. He knows I’m planning on it, and though I’m taking care of a majority of the planning and preparation,
Though I have put more time and energy into the work we have done, and am in many ways more invested in the work, Akhil has expressed an interest in and understanding of what I have set out to do. Akhil and I share something together that in certain ways cannot be shared with anyone else – just like any extended interpersonal relationship. There are also things that Akhil and I cannot share with each other. A notable one in this regard is negativity. Akhil and I both can express joy and satisfaction and interact playfully through online chats and emails, but because I am a client of his in the Get Friday network, he is not supposed to criticize me, lose his temper with me, or refuse to do something based on personal attitudes. This would be “bad business.” So many of his concerns are inaccessible for me. I find these codes of conduct and what they might suppress especially interesting, though I have yet to find a profound way to express this “artistically.”
In the context of this TINT residency I hope to regularly post rough edits of video excerpts and receive feedback on them. But yes, it also enters into the flow of the ongoing work. I’m realizing I have a more heightened sensitivity towards what Akhil might think as I write on this blog, because he can read it. Usually my conversations about the project take place here (in Chicago), but now they’re events there (in Bangalore) as well. Perhaps he will be compelled to comment.