Redefining Working Life

Time & Motion: Redefining Working Life is the final result of a long-term collaboration between FACT and the Royal College of Art’s Creative Exchange Hub that explores changes in the organisation of labour in the post-industrial age.

The two organisations spent more than a year and a half undertaking research through which they chose artists from the fields of video, installation, and coding for the show.

FACT spokesperson Elliot Callard says, ‘It seemed to be essential to ask some fundamental questions through the eyes of artists about how we are coming to terms with working life within an increasingly digital culture.’

The season at FACT is accompanied by the release of an online game designed by the Royal College of Art.  The game serves as a tool for the player to calculate how their life divides into rest, work and leisure with predominantly depressing results.

Another game has been devised by Italian art group Molleindustria who, in their own words, produce, ‘radical games against the tyranny of entertainment’. Their piece, To Build a Better Mousetrap, explores the strange relationship between work and leisure through the medium of an online management game.

The exhibition will also be hosting Mari Velonaki’s Diamandini, an eerie robotic sculpture that invites visitors to contemplate their relationship with technology. Diamandini’s feminine porcelain figure also reminds attendees of the romantic ideas past thinkers had about the future of robotics.

Alongside the chosen artists’ work FACT will be showing films that relate to the themes of the exhibition. Screenings include Taxi Driver and Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.

Time and Motion: Redefining Working Life runs from 12 December to 9 March 2014 at FACT, 81 Wood Street, Liverpool L1.