However, these digital corporations often shield consumers from the reality of their operations. Under precarious working conditions, invisible workers watch and remove problematic user-generated content from social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, as well as AI applications. Much of this work is manual, ensuring that violent and graphic content is kept off the platforms. These workers also play a crucial role in training AI tools to avoid racist or malicious statements.

Given the pivotal role these workers play, one might expect them to hold high-status positions and be well-paid. Yet, the reality is starkly different. These corporations engage in labor arbitrage by outsourcing this work to countries, particularly in the Global South, where a low-cost workforce is willing to perform these tasks—often at the cost of their mental and physical health.

The project "On the (Side)line" reminds us that these workers are on the front lines, ensuring social media and AI remain safe for users. Their concerns, wishes, and interests deserve our attention.

The artistic approach

Grounded in a transdisciplinary approach, our project employs a hybrid, multi-modal method. By multi-modal, we mean a combination of traditional modern art (painting) with digital art in the form of Augmented Reality (AR). This combination creates distinct, yet intermingling and evolving experience layers for visitors to explore. Both layers visualize the narrative in their own unique way, allowing for a more complex and immersive storytelling experience.

Lennart Grau plays with the stylized image of digital capitalism—the colorfulness portraying the overly optimistic vision of digital platform capitalism. The painting mimics a computer screen used by content moderators and AI trainers. The cracks visualize the dark side, visible only to the content moderators, highlighting the horrors they encounter in this low-paid work. The painting offers the viewer a glimpse behind the polished façade of social media platforms and artificial intelligence, revealing insights into the darker aspects of data streams.

Carla Streckwall uses AR to unveil the hidden digital veil. With a provided tablet on-site, the audience is invited to explore the challenging labor and emotional darkness that platform workers experience behind the scenes of the digital world when moderating content on social media platforms or training AI data. The AR layer depicts how those who are sidelined are actually on the front lines. This artwork makes the invisible visible.

The images in the AR layer are created with the open-source software Stable Diffusion, opens an external URL in a new window from Stability AI, opens an external URL in a new window, trained by the Laion 5B, opens an external URL in a new window database.