Art Metropole

20 Apr. 2012

Film screening for Andrew Norman Wilson's Workers Leaving the Googleplex

Artist

Andrew Norman Wilson

Time

9 pm

Offsite Location

Jackman Hall, Art Gallery of Ontario, 317 Dundas St W., Toronto, ON

In this Series

10 Nov. 2011
Screening for Andrew Norman Wilson's Workers Leaving the GooglePlex

Art Metropole is please to announce a screening of Andrew Norman Wilson’s Workers Leaving the GooglePlex at 7:30 on Thursday, November 11th.

Workers Leaving the GooglePlex investigates a marginalized class of workers at Google’s international corporate headquarters in Silicon Valley. As Andrew Norman Wilson documented the mysterious “yellow badge” Google workers, who scan books, page by page, for Google Book Search, he simultaneously chronicled the complex events surrounding his own dismissal from the company. The reference to the Lumière Brothers’ 1895 film Workers Leaving the Factory situates the video within the history of motion pictures, suggesting both transformations and continuities in arrangements of labor, capital, media, and information.

20 Apr. 2012
Performance and lecture by Andrew Norman Wilson

Art Metropole is excited to host a performance and lecture by artist Andrew Norman Wilson. The event is being held in conjuntion with a screening of Wilson’s Workers Leaving the GooglePlex at the Art Gallery of Ontario as part of Images Festival.

The ScanOps project is based on Google Books images in which software distortions, the scanning site, and the hands of ScanOps employees are visible. Through varied analog presentations of these images, the technologies and processes used are emphasized. 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.

The Movement Materials and What We Can Do PowerPoint performance will be held at Art Metropole at 6:30pm. Andrew Norman Wilson employs corporate, academic and artistic lecture techniques to the intertwining concerns of both projects. Medium-specific considerations and various histories of the film, video, photography and publishing media are addressed, emphasizing the materiality of analog and digital media and the labor processes required for transitioning between these forms.

In addition to the Movement Materials and What We Can Do PowerPoint performance, the image-sculptures from the ScanOps series will be inaugurated the same night, and stay on view at Art Metropole until April 27, 2012. All proceeds of the ScanOps‘ sales will support an upcoming ScanOps subscription service and publication released by Art Metropole.

As part of the Images Festival, Art Metropole and the Art Gallery of Ontario are proud to present a screening of Andrew Norman Wilson’s_Workers Leaving the GooglePlex_ . Previously screened at Art Metropole on the occasion of the launch of The Coming Envelope‘s Issue 4 in November 2011, the videowork investigates a top secret, marginalized class of workers at Google’s international corporate headquarters in Silicon Valley. Wilson’s film documents the mysterious yellow badge-wearing ScanOps Google 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.

Andrew Norman Wilson is an artist based in New York. His work has exhibited at MoMA PS1 in New York, Centre Pompidou in Paris, Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, MuseumsQuartier Wien in Vienna, The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, Fluxia in Milan, Project Native Informant in London, Yvon Lambert in Paris, the New York Film Festival, the San Francisco International Film Festival and the Images Festival. He has lectured at Oxford University, Harvard University, Universität der Künste Berlin, and CalArts. His work has been featured in Aperture, Art in America, Artforum, Buzzfeed, Frieze, Gizmodo/Gawker, Kaleidoscope, The New Yorker, and Wired.