A couple of images from Daily Night Shift @ Kunsthal EXTRA CITY – Antwerp, Belgium, which ran from 21st March – 28th June 2020 (opening postponed due to Covid). Photos by Tomas Uyttendaele
A presentation I made as part of the Time & Motion panel at Transmediale 2015 – ‘CAPTURE ALL’, heled at the HKW, Berlin. I talk about the precarious nature of artistic labour, and how I got into knitting.
Images from the Data As Culture exhibition, curated by Shiri Shalmy, at Lighthouse Arts, Brighton. I produced a second version of the ‘8 Hours Labour’ banner for the show. The exhibition also featured works by YoHa, James Bridle, Thickear, Paolo Cirio and James Brooks. Graham Harwood of Yoha also demonstrated the data-visualisation compressed air ‘contraptions’ […]
Images from yesterday’s machine knitting workshop at Lighthouse Arts as part of the Data As Culture exhibition. Participants included a digital arts producer, a graphic design freelancer, a textile artist who worked part time in an office job, and Lighthouse co-ordinator Natalie. Each person had to translate a log of their working week into a […]
Saturday 28th June Machine Knitting workshop with Sam Meech 8 places / 4 sessions 1 hour 15 mins Join me to create a punchcard based on your own working patterns, and knit a sample pattern repeat to take home. Each session is for two participants, and lasts just over an hour. During the session you […]
The Punchcard Economy project will be touring with the Data As Culture exhibition to Lighthouse in Brighton. http://www.lighthouse.org.uk/programme/data-as-culture The show opens on 21st June and runs till 2oth July. As with the ODI show, the venue is again too small to showacse the full banner, however, an ‘8 Hours Labour‘ sample banner containing the same […]
Last weekend I spent my day of rest running a knitting workshop at Future Everything. It was a really enjoyable day, with knitters (both novice and expert) translating their working weeks into punchcards and then knitting them out as samples and scarves. I ran four ‘shifts’, though some people worked through their lunch in order […]
Last week saw some interesting discussion about paid roles and volunteering within arts institutions, as the Precarious Workers Brigade sent an open letter to FACT Liverpool, regarding their restructuring of jobs within the organisation, in particular the gallery supervisors. It was something that I touched on in my post about the Time and Motion symposium, and […]
Some links to the Data As Culture shows at Open Data Institute and Future Everything. Daily Telegraph – exhibition in pictures Motherboard blog -How to Fight the Man
On Wednesday I spoke about the Punchcard Economy project as part of the Time and Motion Symposium at the Royal College of Art. The event presented a variety of perspectives on work and time, and featured artists, researchers and curators involved in the show, as well as keynote presentations and summative reflections from other invited […]
From 24th March, the Open Data Institute in London will be showing a knitted artwork developed from the Punchcard Economy project as part of their new exhibition. DATA AS CULTURE has been put together by curator Shiri Shalmy, and features works by James Bridle, ThickEar, YoHa and James Brooks. My contribution – ‘8 Hours Labour‘ […]
The Punchcard Economy machine knitted banner will be at of the Future Everything festival in Manchester. The work is showing as part of the Data As Culture programme that is occupying venues across the city, curated by Shiri Shalmy, and featuring work by James Bridle, YoHa and Matthew Fuller, and Thickear. 10:00 – 18:00, Sat […]
As part of the Data As Culture exhibition at Future Everything, I will be running a short knitting machine workshop on Sunday 30th March. The workshop lasts 90 mins, and I have 4 slots for up to 4 participants: 10:00 – 11:30 11:30 – 13:00 14:00 – 15:30 15:30 – 17:00 book a slot here […]
Some pictures of the final banner installed at FACT Liverpool as part of the Time & Motion exhibition.
Now that the banner is finished and installed, and the Christmas holidays are nearly upon us, I find myself becoming far more inclined to relax, or perhaps unable to force work into each hour. I feel like an uncoiled spring. It’s a bit of a post-deadline blues, but I’m also enjoying my brain’s reduced capacity […]
The banner is finally finished. At 6am this morning I drove to Liverpool to install it at FACT. by 9 am it was up, rigged in the atrium, hanging from dowel threaded through those carefully constructed hems. I’m very pleased, and have much more documentation to share, but in the meantime… Some facts about the […]
Production gets underway, but a week in and I should be further along…
The data has been collated, and ordered and the final size of the banner worked out, to create the final design layout.
Before the final push next week, I wanted to really try and nail the hem thing, so i’ve spent this weekend in the project space at Federation House in Manchester
I’m into the engineering phase of the knitting design now. This week I’ve been looking at how to attach the various panels to make up the final banner, and also to create a mechanism for suspending it. As the knitting machine can only knit a maximum 200 stitches, then I am limited to producing strips […]
Josh Martinez and McEnroe describe the reality of juggling various endeavours during the working week, by accounting for each of the 168 hours.
Testing the yarns that while make up the final banner
This week, Punchcard Economy – Worker In Progress has been exhibited as part of the Crystallize show at the Korean Brand and Entertain Expo, London.
Claire McAndrew is a Research Associate and Chartered Psychologist at The Bartlett School of Graduate Studies, University College London, interested in the concepts of health and wellbeing; security and resilience; and the future workplace as they extend beyond buildings into the fabric of the city.
Great article on the Economist website, as spotted by John O’Shea – it looks statistically at working hours and productivity across the EU. Working Hours – Get a Life
As there are only 6 weeks before the Time & Motion exhibition opens at FACT, it’s a good point to take stock of the project so far, and outline the next steps for the banner.
An excerpt from the Durham Miners Gala 2013 documentary by Richard Searle. This clip features a banner that relates to the fight for fairer hours and better working conditions for miners. Using the example of a horse / pit pony who is asked to work 8 hours a day compared to another who works 10 […]
An event like Oggcamp feels very relevant to the project, as most of the delegates work with digital tools, and involved in the rethinking and restructuring of ‘work’ – setting up new business within the digital economy.
Vanessa Bartlett is an art writer, academic and producer specialising in performance art, digital cultures and art and mental health. Here she talks briefly about the careful balance of work and wellbeing.
A quick screen grab of the data being produced via the website so far, as laid out in a spreadsheet with conditional formatting. In the first image we can see the total hours in which ‘labour’ is undertaken, and in the second image the ‘out of contract’ hours.
Ben Dalton (http://bendalton.noii.net) is a computational design and new technology researcher based in the Faculty of Arts, Environment & Technology at Leeds Metropolitan University, UK. Here. alongside his knitted ‘out of contract’ hours, he describes his relationship to ‘flexible’ working, and provides some very interesting insights into the role of email.
Some pictures of test banner knits created at the week-long Worker In Progress residency in the FACT Connects space. The aim was to see how text would look at scale, and also how it would be changed by mapping on the data collected so far. The final design with have to make more careful consideration […]
The process I’m initially exploring for creating the design is through using the working hours data as a difference layer. When combined with a base design, any information in the difference layer will invert the value of the base layer. Thus, any hours worked as ‘overtime’ will show up as an inverted stitch. Applying this […]
Betty talks about Tootal textiles in Newton Heath, where her father was a manager.
Welcome to the Punchcard Economy blog. This site will develop over the next 3 months, collecting data about contemporary working patterns, and documenting the development of the artwork – a machine-knitted translation of the Eight Hour Day movement banner.
© 2013