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Paper short abstract

This paper provides a case study for artistic research to offer a counter-aesthetic of contemporary “logistics landscapes,” linking digital technologies and (largely invisible) human labour and ecological demands across spatial and social separations via participatory audiovisual fieldwork.

Paper long abstract

This paper provides a case study for artistic research to offer a counter-aesthetic of contemporary “logistics landscapes,” linking the visible digital technologies and (largely invisible) human labour and ecological demands across spatial and social separations via participatory methods and visual ethnographic fieldwork. The project “Ghost Platform: Generating the “Complex Image” of Data, Labour, and Logistics” (2022-2025) utilized unique audiovisual perspectives to formulate new aesthetic, legal and theoretical tools. Employing methods of co-creation and self-representation, logistics workers and organizers used digital technologies to document the violence enacted by digitalised logistics systems, while sharing examples of how to resist and subvert these very mechanisms. The result is a co-produced aesthetic counterpoint to industrial visions of smooth and smart circulation via the witnessed systemic contradictions and exploitation of logistics and platform workers.

Situated in or past the periphery of the urban landscape, transport and logistics sectors are also emblematic of how digital technologies become utilised through algorithmic management and platformisation to co-produce a peri-urban socio-ecological wasteland. The warehouse sitting next the data centre becomes a symbol of hidden-in-plain sight urban-excess; two seemingly impenetrable black boxes that hide the role these structures play in facilitating a socially differentiated urban economy. In these landscape makeovers non-adjacent flattened land becomes the primary site of urban speculation and its corollaries: collapse, bust, and wasteful abandonment.