Ghost Worker_001

Ghost Worker_001 mpg | 1280 x 720 px | 00:26 | 2025

Ghost Worker 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.

Ghost Worker starts from a video that is 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.

A custom software application slices the video 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 Worker 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 Ghost Work 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.