ABOUT

Precarity Triptych is a three-part New Media work which I created while I was a Resident at Roundtable Residency in Toronto, in 2016. The theme for the residency that year was ‘Precarity,’ which fit extremely well with the work I had been making in the tail end of grad school just a few months before. The work consists of three different pieces, each really no more than a sketch made on a common theme. These three works, On Tokyo Time, Snowcrash and Toe to Head each look at the idea of precarity not through the lens of scarcity, but rather overabundance. Specifically, an overabundance that exists to benefit the system and not those within in, and which creates all of the instability, illogic and trauma of extreme scarcity, but does so through overproduction, overefficiency, overproliferation and the continual reinvesting of hierarchies and control mechanisms.

The pieces were originally displayed on three identical MacBook White laptops which I had bought secondhand for the exhibition of my thesis work earlier that year. Fittingly, these laptops have each since broken down, becoming unusable. My primary laptop at the time has also since died, taking with it a lot of the original files for these works, which I (again fittingly, if foolishly) failed to properly backup. Beyond this physical collapse of the original work, there have also been updates to the major web browsers that have made the second piece, Snowcrash, no longer work as smoothly as it once did. The version of it presented here is a partial recreation, using as much salvaged code as possible. The third work, Toe to Head, has fared the worst, with nothing remaining of it but a screen capture video I made just after it was exhibited.

Below are what remains of Precarity Triptych’s three pieces, along with a description of each including segments from the original contextualizing material.

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