OUTSOURCED is a two-part exhibition project organised for Banner Repeater’s serial publication UN-PUBLISH*.

Through presenting two consecutive solo projects by graphic designer/artist Tara Kelton and co-director of Museum of Vestigial Desire, Prayas Abhinav, UN-PUBLISH: OUTSOURCED explores the notion of outsourcing in its relationship with the users’ cultures and logics emerging from communicating through web-based services and online platforms.

With our day-to-day collecting of records and information we regularly outsource services online, from ready-to-use display platforms to distributive tools, usually abandoning ourselves to what these services offer us; behaving according to their terms and conditions with regards to forms of engagement and modes of sociality. These behavioural patters are often determined by the service providers choices, who, via anticipating modes of interpretation and logics create web architectures which are often promoted as platforms for global sociality with idea(l)s of universal consumption, productivity and communication. However, these beliefs of universality and globalism increasingly collide not only with the control effects of the interfaces we quotidianly adopt, but also with the nationalisation and going-local of internet governance, which, similarly to the service providers, is shifting its focus towards putting into place laws that are tailored to the specificity of national socio-cultural and linguistic circumstances.

Contributing to Banner Repeater’s: UN-PUBLISH serial publication, and in conjunction with the multiple modes of dissemination of artworks that Banner Repeater offers, such as free distribution of artists publications from the reading room and public space of Platform 1 at Hackney Downs rail station in London, Kelton and Abhinav have developed two new bodies of work to be experienced from different locations: at Banner Repeater project space, in the UN-PUBLISH publication 2.04 and 2.05 and at or-bits.com.

Part One features Karizma by Tara Kelton, a new body of work exploring the processes of computational production and digital labour through working collaboratively with Bangalore-based digital service providers' workers and online automated services, such as Mechanical Turks, who were commissioned to produce the artworks presented in the exhibition.

Part Two features the Museum of Vestigial Desire, which proposes a reading environment of its own online content in the form of books, publications and videos; content which has been generated through a process of computational analysis operated by a human, its co-director Prayas Abhinav.

For more details about the two projects go to the online artists pages and download the respective press releases.

* UN-PUBLISH is a series of critical works published on paper which are determined by ideas of shifting time and labour relations which are intrinsic to Banner Repeater's location and which focus on the co-evolution of humans and technology. From its location Banner Repeater hosts an archive of artists published material, a resource that for its distinctive location sites in the lives of commuters, passing through a working station environment during rush hour.

This project was supported by Banner Repeater with funding by Arts Council England and Chelsea Arts Club Trust.