Unser Markt, Unsere Zensur

The making of Unser Markt, Unsere Zensur

The project started with a group of two and unfortunately reduced itself to one at the end. Nonetheless, most work and research were done in a teamwork and we have begun analysing the movie “La Jetée”, since it was clear we will make a photo film and its one of the most famous ones. We were and are inspired by its soundscape and narrative. We were missing a topic and took a while to move from “Art and AI” to “Content Moderation”.

For most of the time, I was reading essays by Cathrin Misselhorn. She is dealing with the end of art and AIs influence on it, as well as the ethics of the machinery. But since we didn’t get inspired by that I started writing a story about “digital detox”, which was quite humorous but didn’t push us in any solid direction. As a task of our seminar, we had to pick a post digital job and prepare a presentation about it, which brought a lot of clearance and inspiration to our minds. I, personally, got mostly inspired by the movie “The Cleaners” (2018), which is an educational, broadly diversified documentary about the outsourced labour of a content moderator. It reached me emotionally and echoed in my head.

I wasn’t quite aware of that kind of labour, and it surprised me that it is done by humans and not AI. People moderate our content, decide whether a picture, video or text might be harmful or not. People, who are traumatised by this work. People, who need that work for paying rent. People, who are not seen, who are remaining anonymous, silenced by their employers, not seen because they are far from us. Work that is done in countries like the Philippines, Kenia, Pakistan, Malaysia and India. Besides the movie, we were reading articles about other experiences, the psycho-logical consequences, and the societal awareness of it. So, in all of that, we discovered our urge to educate others about it, since many people aren’t aware of the existence of this kind of job. It was quite a process to find a concept to work with.

First, I wrote another story. It was a story about a day of a content moderator, but followed by abstract photography, and since the text wasn’t very clear about its content, the photographs were not underlining its meaning. Thus, not helping the recipient to understand anything about content moderation, so we threw the idea away and worked on a more, allegedly thought, clear and direct concept.

So, for the most part, we were simulating the labour of a content moderator, working with found footage photographs, depicting violence, nudity, hate speech, artificial Art and photographs. We were struggling to find a balanced way to show violence or figuring out, if it was necessary at all. We tried to put masks on it but it wasn’t moving in a right direction, it opened more topics. It raised more questions than gave answers, e.g.: What is art? When is nudity a performance, and when pornography? How does a democratic online world look? Do videos and pictures about war serve educational purposes? Do we need them at all?

We approached these topics very strikingly and on the surface.

Through my partners absence, I got pushed back to the first concept, a more poetic approach. The time pressure made me move forward quickly and so I developed another story, depicting a market as a metaphor for a digital platform. Its focus is on the audio, and the surreal, Man Ray like photographs are opening a room for a lot of imagination and demonstrating a far-off world that’s not “real” but virtual. Eventually it deals with the questions of: what has content moderation to do with me? In a western society, in Germany. What do I want in an online world, what kind of conversation I want? The answer is clear and sheds light on what freedom can be, even when there are boundaries.

Further, questioning the need for these boundaries and seeing boundaries is a liberation rather than limitation and requirement for a democratic dialogue in both worlds, the non-virtual and virtual one.