"The supermarket of images", click workers and the environment

Text by: Isabelle Chenu Follow

We live in a world increasingly saturated with images and this is not without consequence. In "Le supermarché des images" at Jeu de Paume, in Paris, around fifty contemporary artists invite us to reflect on this economy of the image.

Publicity

Three billion images circulate every day on social networks and while you are reading this sentence two million images are circulating. Faced with such overproduction, the question of their storage and transport, even electronic, arises more than ever, but also of their value.

Unprecedented consequences

The exhibition opens with an installation, a huge collage made up of thousands of images stored for three years in the memory of a computer. Peter Szendy is the curator of the exhibition Le supermarché des images , the title of an essay he published on the issue three years ago.

“ This new economy of images has an impact, consequences on human work which are probably unprecedented. We often imagine that this immense circulation of images is managed by machines; in fact, it is often underpaid, exploited human beings who do this for poverty wages. They are called click workers, people who click all day and who sell "likes" and make "views", they tag images, to classify them in databases, or to censor them. There are people who watch beheading and pornography images all day, serving GAFA. "

" My name is Ramya "

GAFAs (Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon) have considerable economic and financial power, sometimes even greater than the budget of a State. Martin le Chevallier devoted a video to these click workers, eight striking minutes, images of empty rooms against the background of audio testimonies like this one: “ My name is Ramya, I live in Mumbai, India. I work in my room. I watch videos. I listen to voices. I type. I write everything they say, in English or Hindi, at over a hundred words per minute. I manage to live on it ... more or less. "

Martin le Chevallier's video gives a voice to these invisible people, many of whom are women, paid by the task acting as moderators on social networks.

Geraldine Juárez: “Gerry Images” (2014) © Geraldine Juárez

Eyes torn from Saint Lucia

They view often horrific images all day long that they must exclude. The artist Lauren Huret paints a very touching picture on this subject: a portrait of a click worker in the Philippines, represented in Saint Lucia, a martyr condemned to have her eyes blown off, a bit like this woman with a gentle gaze condemned to sort images all day long and who wears his eyes on a tray. The dozens of proposals made by artists in this “supermarket of images” also demolish a myth that the digital image is immaterial.

Samuel Bianchini is one of the artists present in the exhibition. His work Visible Hand represents the image of a digital hand that materializes on a screen according to the share price. A way of reminding that digital images depend on monetary flows, but also on the energies that feed them.

The “ immateriality ” scam

“ We talk a lot about the cloud, the immateriality of digital, etc. In fact, we realize that it is a form of scam, because digital is extremely consumer of energy, raw material. The cloud is mostly huge warehouses, servers that need to be cooled. Everything is very material. We are starting to point to this material regime of current images, but that will not play the game because we can consume excessively, since it would not have an impact on our environment. However, our production and our consumption of images is growing - we see it with social networks - this production and consumption has a huge environmental impact. "

Behind the apparent fluidity of the networks hides the viscosity of petroleum, rare raw materials that must be extracted from the ground, cables, air conditioners, etc. Many artists make remarkable proposals on this theme. You may no longer be able to scroll through the images on your screens with the same casualness as you roam this ambitious, rich and multiple exhibition, to be seen at the Jeu de Paume Museum, in Paris, until June 7.

Newsletter With the Daily Newsletter, find the headlines directly in your mailbox

Download the app

• Arts
• Culture
• France

On the same subject

Environmental radio Gorilla FM to broadcast in South Kivu

Lack of diversity: the Victories of music pointed out

Death of Claire Bretécher: a pioneering designer