MOVEMENT MATERIALS AND WHAT WE CAN DO
ANDREW NORMAN WILSON
June 16th, 2012
In Movement Materials and What We Can Do, Andrew Norman Wilson employs corporate, academic and artistic lecture techniques to the intertwining concerns of his projects Workers Leaving the GooglePlex and ScanOps. Medium-specific considerations and various histories of film/video, photography and publishing media are addressed, emphasizing the materiality of both analog and digital media and the labor processes they entail.
For this iteration, Wilson transforms American Medium into a casual multi-use loft site, mixing home and office, business and recreation, production and regeneration, a space equally amenable to group brainstorming, websurfing and Hatha Yoga.
Workers Leaving the GooglePlex investigates the marginalized class of Google Books "ScanOps" workers at Google's international corporate headquarters in Silicon Valley. Wilson documents the yellow badged ScanOps workers, while simultaneously chronicling the complex events surrounding his own dismissal from the company. The reference to the Lumière Brother's 1895 film Workers Leaving the Factory situates the video within motion picture history, suggesting transformations and continuities in arrangements of labour, capital, media, and information.
ScanOps is based on Google Books images in which software distortions, the scanning site, and the hands of the ScanOps employees are visible. Through varied analog presentations, the aesthetics of the images and the apparatuses that produced them are foregrounded over the originally intended content. These re-materializations are treated as photography— taking the form of framed image-sculptures, compiled in a mobile book-sculpture, and presented in a performance-lecture.
