Ghost Cut - Some Clear Pixels Amongst Many Black Boxes
Aarti Sunder is an artist living and working in India (Chennai). She works with moving image, writing, drawing and painting. Her interests lie within techno-politics, focusing on the study of infrastructure and society – from contemporary labour practices, fictional edges of protest, myth, and digital-terrestrial play to expanded platform politics. Aarti published Platform Politics - Within, Above and Under, a short set of contributions that considered different readings into the idea of the platform. Ideas ranged from contemporary philosophy to online niche spaces, to education, AI/labour, and the future of gig work. Currently she is working on technology and its relationship with the spiritual, where those overlaps become a mode of governance and what kinds of visuals are born out of that relationship.
Aarti has exhibited her work at Hayy Jameel, the Singapore Biennale 22, 1ShanthiRoad, Haus der Kulturen Der Welt, MIT, Warehouse421, Goethe Insitute, Kunstverein Leipzig, BauhausImaginista, Alserkal Avenue, ISCP and the Museum of Yugoslav History. She has been the recipient of grants and fellowships from MIT, Sommerakademie Paul Klee, Ashkal Alwan, Harvard FSC Film Center, Sarai and Khoj, Akademie Der Kunstand Sharjah Art Foundation amongst others. Recent screenings of her work include the 67th BFI London Film Festival and Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin 2023. Currently her work is being shown at the Albertinum - Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden in Germany.
Aarti Sunder, ‘Ghost Cut – Some Clear Pixels Amongst Many Black Boxes’, 2023. Film still. Courtesy and © the artist. Selected for AFI’24 by Project 88, Mumbai, India.
Aarti Sunder, ‘Ghost Cut – Some Clear Pixels Amongst Many Black Boxes’, 2023. Film still. Courtesy and © the artist. Selected for AFI’24 by Project 88, Mumbai, India.
Aarti Sunder, ‘Ghost Cut – Some Clear Pixels Amongst Many Black Boxes’, 2023. Film still. Courtesy and © the artist. Selected for AFI’24 by Project 88, Mumbai, India.
Ghost Cut - Some Clear Pixels Amongst Many Black Boxes (2023)
Aarti Sunder
Selected by Project 88, India
Ghost Cut – Some Clear Pixels Amongst Many Black Boxes draws from conversations with Amazon MTurk workers and their relationship with the politics of the Mechanical Turk platform – the varying levels of transparencies and opacities that make the platform what it is.
Focusing on the backend of AI and machine learning processes, in this work, Aarti Sunder investigates the relationships between the analogic, digital, and the terrestrial. What kind of (human) labour is required for the smooth functioning of an automation? Who does this backend labour, where does it take place, and what does it entail?
A secondary focus is the exploration of the subjective nature of data gathering, processing,and annotating, along with the material infrastructures it is dependent on. In the absence of fixed constants and safety nets, abstraction emerges as an important and forced tool.
Project 88 on their selection for AFI '24:
In Ghost Cut – Some Clear Pixels Amongst many Black Boxes, Aarti Sunder turns to techno-futurist ideas, through her research on the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform. Her film explores the outsourcing of labour, a precarious, isolated entity, which in turn, trains AI platforms that generate ‘objective’ data.
Solidarity itself cannot be imagined in the absence of labour; yet far too often we neglect to account for the complex nuances intrinsic to labour forces in our contemporary. Aarti Sunder’s film thinks through the theme of ‘solidarity’ by dismantling both obscure and transparent forms of labour, thus becoming a critical intervention into the ways in which we imagine (and forge) possibilities of such solidarity across geopolitical borders.