Ghost Work_01_00 Mov | 1080 x 1080 px | 00:10 | 2025

Ghost Work exposes the invisible labor sustaining supposedly “autonomous” systems. It investigates the blurred boundaries between algorithmic processes and human effort, transforming absence into evidence — a proof of presence.

Starting from a series of recognisable photographs made by curator Anika Meier of an internet café (the site of the exhibition “Proof of Presence”), the images are repeatedly algorithmically subdivided until only fragments remain. That progressive disintegration is both method and message — the works shows how labour (human and machine) is atomised for efficiency and profit, then erased from view — and in doing so it becomes a literal proof of presence.

Each piece in the series is a single, evolving image. The starting point is an everyday scene which carries social and economic resonance for networked labour. A custom software application slices that image into ever smaller units, producing fields of fragments that hover between recognition and loss. The fragments, their order and density, heat, coordinates and labelling signatures, are the material of the piece: they are simultaneously aesthetic choices and documentary traces. Viewers encounter an image that no longer simply depicts presence but documents the processes that made that presence invisible.

Ghost Work is driven by iterative code, an algorithmic “slicing” routine that progressively subdivides pixels and regions, exposing intermediate stages that map to work flows such as labeling, tagging, and microtasking. The program’s parameters — scale, rate of subdivision, and recombination thresholds — are tuned to reveal different rhythms of extraction. Crucially, the work invites mental reconstruction: as viewers try to piece the image back together they enact the very labour usually outsourced to invisible hands and opaque systems. The visual operation thus mirrors the social operation.

The series reframes the aesthetics of automation as a site of ethical inquiry rather than neutral progress. By making absence legible, Ghost Work demands accountability for the distributed labour that underwrites digital “intelligence.” It asks audiences to recognise—and re-humanise—the fragile, specific, and often exploitative infrastructures behind polished interfaces. As a “proof of presence,” the work insists that disappearance is not an absence but a trace: one that can be read, reconstructed, and made politically consequential.