[Harvesting] The Crops of Your Labor

Installation and ongoing computational process, 2025

Like a relentless harvesting machine in high season, reaping the fields lane by lane, the computational process at the core of this work fetches over two billion images—row by row from several large, publicly available image datasets—detects and extracts the objects from each one, and writes them to a physical hard drive.

With approximately 380 years of continuous runtime, this act becomes a performative gesture, addressing the complex entanglement of labor in massive data collection and processing—from unpaid or unknowing contributions, CAPTCHA tests, and data marketplaces to outsourced labeling work and the production of the necessary physical hardware. By shifting focus between input and output, computation and machinery, this work unveils the objects it represents and the interconnected networks of labor and materiality behind them.

Video-Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRRNOUOSF78