2012 / Score and performance
Hence Where Labour
Lying on the gallery floor, a performer sings a musical setting of the text “...hence where labour in which a human being does what a thing could do has ceased.” The passage is taken from an English translation of Karl Marx’s 1858 manuscript Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, a fragment that anticipated a future of total machine automation.
My setting of Marx imagines a musical version of such automation. I designed a computer algorithm to generate a score based on permutation rules that rearrange five musical notes corresponding to the letters C–H–E–A–P over the course of one hour.
The project sets this unit of wage-labor time against the economic imperative to drive down costs. If Marx imagined this tendency would fundamentally change the nature of work, Hence Where Labour asks what remains of art when it becomes a fully automated process.
Performed by Fahad Siadat
Presents Gallery, Brooklyn, 2012