Francesco Gagliardi

Bio

Francesco Gagliardi is a performance artist, historian of performance and filmmaker based in New York City. He has been working internationally as an actor, director and performance artist for over a decade. In 2000 he translated, directed, and performed in the first Italian production of Gertrude Stein's “Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights.” Programs of his work were recently presented in Los Angles (The Wulf, December 2008), Berlin (Miss Micks, January 2009), Torino, Italy (quindicifebbraio, June 2009), and New York City (Ontological-Hysteric Theater, September 2009). He is currently working on a series of invisible performances of mental tasks, and on a video series exploring the performative aspects of translation. He is writing about the photographic documentation of performance art in the 1960s and 70s, and researching the work of Stuart Sherman. He holds a B.Phil. from Oxford University and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Turin.

Abstract

While Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is often regarded as a paramount example of exploitation, according to a number of surveys several (western) MTurk workers engage with the outrageously underpaid “HITs” (Human Intelligence Tasks) crowdsourced through the service for reasons other than monetary gain. The repetitiveness and mechanical nature of many tasks offered through Amazon’s “crowdsourcing marketplace” dovetails with deep-seated habits of compulsive multitasking to generate a troubling form of entertainment.

This performance/presentation will report on an ongoing project exploring the perfromative aspects of this mode of engagement with MTurk (and similar) tasks. The project, which involves designing and commissioning tasks through the Amazon service, is funded entirely by working on HITs.