Artist Interview: James Coupe, Creator of “Watchtower: A Machine for Living”
James Coupe, the winner of the Surveillance Studies Network’s inaugural Arts Fund Prize, shares his reflections on his award-winning work: Watchtower: A Machine for Living. (This interview was conducted by Will Partin, an editorial assistant at Surveillance & Society.)
Can you talk about some of your inspirations for the piece?
So when I started working with Mechanical Turk, I learned quite a lot about visibility — it was an important theme. Because Mechanical Turk is set up as a service where humans pretend to be machines, they describe themselves as artificial, artificial intelligence. With the history of Mechanical Turk — just this plain robot that suggests this idea of a human AI — it’s interesting. Generally speaking, [Mechanical Turk] gives its workers a task, or a hit, as they call it — an intelligence task.
So I assigned them to record one minute of the day, every hour, between nine and five. And it became clear pretty quickly that I had created a platform of sorts for workers to make themselves visible. And they were taking advantage of that, rather than just recording a minute of the wall or the floor for the day. The videos were quite confessional and quite performative, definitely encoded with all the characteristics of social media. In terms of the kind of things people were doing, saying, and sharing, it was very diaristic.
That work generated a huge number of videos, which were then exhibited back in Seattle in a building that was about to be knocked down on the doorstep of Amazon HQ. It was going to be to demolished and replaced with the kind of architecture — one of those condos or whatever — that would serve the real Amazon.
So you had these two categories of workers: you had the invisible Mechanical Turk workers and then you have these very visible Amazon workers. You have the software engineers, the developers, who are very visible, as Amazon has space in downtown Seattle. The headquarters has a substantial effect on Seattle’s economy and landscape and so on. Then, at the same time, in the outskirts of Seattle, in the mountains, there are these quiet rural areas where there are these watchtowers or lookout towers, which were put in place to detect fires and things like that.
They’d be manned, somebody would be up there observing. Nowadays they’re not really being used for that purpose. I think they’re more likely to be used as rentals, almost like something available on Airbnb.
So these architectures of observation that involved a human occupant have increasingly being replaced by machines that can detect things like fires in different sorts of ways (sensors, cameras, and so on). It’s another example of where a machine has replaced a human, which is definitely part of the dialogue with Mechanical Turk. These workers are doing jobs that are present, and it’s cheaper, more efficient for humans to do things like reading receipts or doing surveys.
But the more that these workers do them [these tasks], the more metadata they create, which then helps train computers to make the workers obsolete in the future. So, I’m interested in that, that kind of shift. And I’m interested in what surveillance means today. It seems like that conventional panoptic model — you have some kind of tower or platform from which, say, the state observes you, or people observe other people — it’s really shifting into a much more distributed model. Instead, you see things like Google Home, home automation, Alexa, and, of course, all the data leaks with various corporations, like Facebook and Cambridge Analytica most recently. It’s not about a tower in the woods looking out, and it’s not about someone with a spy camera up on a mountain. It’s much more distributed than that.
So with the watchtower piece, we began with the idea of putting this tower inside of this big atrium, and the exhibition — it’s called the New Observatory. It was concerned with the question of what an observatory is today, and how observation works. Having this big watchtower in the middle of everything was anachronistic in many ways. It’s an impotent watchtower, you can’t really see anything. It’s stuck inside of a building, but it also stands as a model of the observatory, and of observation, that is being replaced nowadays.
Mechanical Turk screens, which are embedded in this watchtower, and there’s a bunch of computers up in the cabinet. Rather than a human being there, we now have a bunch of computers. And, here, the Mechanical Turk workers were tasked with doing a specific range of activities, like exercising three times a day. So, really trying to construct routines for the workers that involve observation and self-observation, and which demonstrated the kinds of observation or processes that are more current today. It’s not just about being watched. It’s about us performing, almost, for these systems, and establishing routines and metadata — those things that feed back into the system so they learn more about us. Bringing that all together, it was a watchtower in which Mechanical Turk workers would be hired to perform and do observational tasks, which seems much more aligned with what observation means today.
What was the initial public reaction to the work?
I think that it was … big. There’s something about making a tower that is quite an aggressive act — building a tower inside of a museum is quite a statement. But at the same time, I think that was quite a conscious choice. That representation of power through a tower, it’s something that the worker acknowledges and tries to undermine and play with, to some extent. The whole thing becomes like a clock, I suppose, which I guess is another form of observation. It purchases time, hires people from Mechanical Turk to exchange time for money. It’s monitoring and looking at the sequence of people’s day and having them get into a pattern of observation — almost like actually controlling how they orchestrate their day.
So these workers will say, “Okay, I gotta pray every morning. Or, I gotta eat every morning. I gotta exercise every morning.” There’s an interesting feedback control mechanism in place. People’s reaction to the videos is, in many cases, uncomfortable, because there are strange hierarchies at play in the work. We can see them, but they can’t see us. We know what this thing is — it’s an artwork. It’s an installation. But Mechanical Turk workers, when they do their task, they usually don’t have any idea what it’s for, or what the purpose of this thing is. So there’s a weird relationship with the audience, I guess, almost that they’re implicated. Like, “Okay, you have the luxury of watching, of observing this work and experiencing it. You get to see the full picture with these crowd workers.” They are increasingly disassociated from the goals of what these tasks actually are for.
When you were starting to conceptualize how surveillance functions in the work, were there any theorists you were reading in particular?
There’s quite a few people who have written about Mechanical Turk, but, ultimately, it all comes back to Marx, I suppose, and theories of labor. I was particularly interested in issues of surplus value as described by Marx. So I guess, conceptually, the notion of general intellect and surplus value comes into play. On the one hand, we have general intellect, which is this idea of ‘what is abstract human knowledge’? What do humans know that can’t be translated into a machine? So that, for sure, and also of surplus value, which is an economic formula to see how you generate profit from a factory, the workers, the materials, and so on — how you generate capital. But it seemed to me as something that also applies to being human when you think about certain activities as involving surplus value. So, that’s one of the reasons I picked out things like praying, because it seemed to me like that was a form of surplus too, trying to pray in order to get ahead of the game, or engage in some spiritual practice that generates a surplus. Why do we do the things that we do? Why do we exercise? Why do we cook our food in a certain way? We’re trained to glean some pleasure, or some excess, of some sort from the materials we worked with. So, I’m interested in those themes.
Can you talk about the title? I’m assuming it’s a direct reference to Le Corbusier.
Yeah. The Machine for Living comes from Le Corbusier. I guess it’s an interesting play on words in that this watchtower becomes a machine that represents people’s lives, or the lives of the workers. It’s how they make a living. But it’s also Corbusier’s architectural system. I’m interested in some kind of living machine, but also a machine through which people generate a living. So, trying to think about a watchtower as an autonomous system. And, obviously, this is connected to this idea of the future of architecture — how certain architecture is dear to us and integrates with our lives and our lifestyles. This anachronistic watchtower — it’s a symbol of the past. But it’s also a reminder that these kinds of structures are still in place. They’re just different now.
Is there anything in particular that you think important for viewers to know about the piece that sometimes gets missed?
I guess certain moments within the work. They take place over a fairly extended period of time, so in terms of the documentation of the work, there are lots of snippets of moments, the things the workers are doing. Some workers would complete a task every day, and so you get a real insight into the passions of their life. Some people would be kind of a one-off. I think that’s important. Also, the sound is something that’s hard to get through documentation, so the kinds of things the workers are talking about, and that they’re saying. It establishes strange hierarchical, empathic relationships with the audience. And it’s something that, to some extent, you really have to be there to understand.
