Will Boase The Networked Audience Synopsis Part I

After visiting a show by Dries Verhoeven about the precarity of zero-hour work in the age of
automation, I had a coffee with a friend who works in culture and commissions socially-engaged
artworks. I had been working for a grocery delivery company, cycling around the city to deliver
brown paper bags full of groceries. It had been hard work, poorly paid and isolating. But my friend
confidently told me that the couriers are well paid, and that the work is easy because I was using an
e-bike. He believed he understood the job’s conditions and participants. How can a topic so
prominent be so misunderstood, even among people who consider it concerning?
Artists producing work on subjects of social critique appear to be trapped within a loop of futility.
There is a subject and its discussers, and the two occupy separate spacial and economic realms. The
subject exists in the wild, and must be explored and documented by artists, with specimens brought
back for presentation as evidence in broader sociopolitical arguments. Discussers engage with such
culture as vicarious experience and walk away confident that their experience constitutes some sort
of engagement. Meanwhile as cultural practitioners we justify ourselves through our responsibility to
our subjects and their stories. But who are we telling those stories to, and why should they listen?
When I graduated I moved to Uganda and started getting work for the international press and for
charities. In journalism, I covered news and riots and learned how much sits outside the frame. In
charity work I watched well-paid foreign communications consultants staying in comfortable hotels
and meeting 'stakeholders' and 'beneficiaries' before making use of their contacts in the press to place
articles about the great and important work being done by X charity. My images would illustrate
these texts, and would show the 'beneficiaries' and 'stakeholders' looking appreciative, or using tools
they had received, or doing other sensible things.
I also started a company which now has 35 employees. It should come as no surprise then that I have
a strong relationship with the topic of labour, and that I am critical of its representation in culture. In
one life I am a photographer, a digital freelancer wearing many hats and quilting together my
precarious living, while in another I am an employer responsible for people’s salaries. I also operate
from a position of privilege, heavily implicated as a cultural consumer.
The discussion with my friend helped me to see that critical art is not changing the public discourse
whatsoever. In fact such works seem to have the opposite effect, leading people to believe that they
now understand the experience of those represented, an intention of solidarity reduced to an act of
voyeurism. I found myself again reaching the same conclusion that I had found myself at again and
again: What effect does my photographic work (or anyone else’s, for that matter) really have? And if
it has no effect, as the evidence I see seems to indicate, why make it? What is the point
of producing pretty pictures if they only serve to fool people into mistaking seeing for
understanding?
For Part II click here or follow the QR Code