Telltale: Economies of Time
2022-2023
Melbourne Now
National Gallery of Victoria (NGV)
Melbourne, Australia


Sound design | Dean Schrieke
Facial anonymisation | DeepPrivacy GAN (Håkon Hukkelås, Rudolf Mester, Frank Lindseth)

With special thanks to: Dean Schrieke, Dr Timothy Lynam, Katharina Prugger, Amita Kirpalani, Ewan McEoin, Jessica Brent and Georgia Jones.

“For Melbourne Now, Lindo continues her ongoing investigation into the Amazon-owned crowdsourcing platform, 'Mechanical Turk' (MTurk)—a digital marketplace for outsourcing micro-tasks (Human Intelligence Tasks, or HITs) to humans. On MTurk, businesses, organisations and researchers ('Requesters') are provided access to a 24/7 globally distributed human workforce. Primarily, MTurk Requesters contract workers to complete repetitive tasks, such as tagging and categorising images or text, to create training data for artificial intelligence algorithms.

In Telltale: Economies of Time, Lindo commissioned 1820 anonymous MTurk workers over twelve months to submit a short video sequence in response to the video submitted by the worker before them. The result is a chain mail–style narrative that provides a window into the lives of the anonymous human workers whose labour enables the advance of artificial intelligence—an extension of Lindo's inquiry into how automated technologies have displaced and reinstated human labour throughout time.”

  • Click here for essay by Tim Hall
  • Click here for essay by Cameron Hurst
  • Click here for essay by Roslyn Orlando
  • Click here for exhibition review by Giles Fielke
  • Click here for exhibition review by Cameron Hurst
  • Click here for essay by Harriet Flavel
  • Click here for excerpt by Amalia Lindo


Image Details

Telltale: Economies of Time
2022-23
Twelve-channel colour digital video installation, twelve-channel panned audio, steel poles
Dimensions variable
6 hr 36 min 

Images courtesy of Sean Fennessy








© Amalia Lindo 2024