Shepherd’s Office (SO) is a collaborative research initiative between artists Daniela Vainio and Zaneta Zukalova, investigating the ethics and politics of digital labour within the framework of the Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) platform. Our proposed participatory project will directly engage the community of AMT workers and the exhibition visitors, who will participate in our performance.

AMT is a crowdsourcing online platform where Requesters (could be companies, researchers) register Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs) to be completed by Workers, for very little pay. 

To create our video, we will be using Zoom as a facilitating platform to make a connection to AMT workers, creating a space for them to be seen by and share opinions with their ‘colleagues' and ‘employer’. Our duo will satirically perform as Jeffica, the workers’ fictional employer, accompanied by Alexa, a partially automated occupational therapist. The workers will be encouraged to share any feedback on their working conditions, and how Covid-19 affects them, while receiving pretentious advice from Alexa and lack of sympathy from Jeffica, both ironically copying the stereotypes assigned to their roles. 

We will record the Zoom sessions and edit the footage into a video piece. This video will be part of our live performance - a parody on a company conference. We will present the video as a 'research outcome' to be discussed with the rest of our company team, which will be the exhibition visitors in this case.