The Future of Labor

Design and the Elastic Mind
Museum of Modern Art
reviewed by Julie Ashcraft

In this age of "colony collapse", farmers wonder where the honey bees have gone to, how crops will be pollinated and food shortages averted. The bees have left the farm for college, if this show is any indication. Bees are doing prestigious work, sniffing out Cancer under Susana Soares' guidance in the Design Interactions Department of the Royal College of Art in the United Kingdom. And bees are making lovely vases for Tomas Gabzdil Libertiny at Studio Libertiny in the Netherlands. Small wonder art assisting work is increasingly competitive, with insects in the labor market. No worry about the crops, though. By the time crops are failing, perhaps the robotic flies developed by Robert J. Wood at Harvard Microbiotics Laboratory in the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Science will be able to do some pollen heavy-lifting and save the day. (If not, and if humans get surly during ensuing food shortages, perhaps tiny tasers will be attached to the robotic flies in an effort to keep the humans under control.)

Even houseplants and lowly algae are being put to work at Harvard, and at Le Laboratoire in France. Designers Matthieu Lehanneur and David Edwards promote plants found by NASA to be especially good at removing toxins and adding oxygen to the air as components central to their air filtering machines. (The information in this part of the exhibit had a direct, beneficial impact on my health. Leaving this show, I immediately bought a dozen of the plants NASA recommends for cleaning air and brought them home to my downtown apartment. The air quality in the apartment immediately improved, my breathing became deeper and headaches disappeared.)

Fluttering English ivy plants are the apparent inspiration for the beautiful GROW prototype, by Samuel Cabot Cochran and Benjamin Wheeler Howes of SMIT--Sustainably Minded Interactive Technology. This energy capturing system is not only innovative for making solar panels aesthetically pleasing, but for allowing them to capture wind energy as well. Perhaps the love that seems to emanate from this project will capture consumers willing to let the sun and wind work for them.

Human energy is put to good use in NSSa: Non-Stop Shoes, by emiliana designstudio's Emiti Padros. These shoes gather enough energy generated by a wearer walking around in them to power a light bulb when the shoes are later taken off. Gastric acid from a decomposing human corpse is proportedly used to make batteries power a vibrator, a flashlight and a tree ornament in the macabrely humorous Afterlife, by James Auger and Jimmy Loizeau of the Design Interactions Department of the Royal College of Art, UK.

There is a serious "yuck factor" to Amir Lipsicas' large, glossy image of Oded Ezer's Typosperma. The exhibit card lists them as "cloned human sperm with typographic information implanted into their DNA". What would THAT turn into if it impregnated a woman? And what would her labor be like? If she was a paid surrogate birth mother, would the designers be legally obligated to inform her of the nature of the bio-engineered life inside her?


Perhaps due to efforts to avoid complications that sex, body fluids and even casual human relations may bring, machines/robots may conquer even the illicit labor market to have the last wordless gesture, as they do in Accessories for Lonely Men, by Noam Toran. At last a man may have a woman's shadow projected near him, sheets pulled off him, hair flicked across him, smoke blown at him and dishes thrown at him in his solitude, alone with his Accessories.