ABSTRACT
Sutton argues that Labour in a Single Shot is defined by the online structure of the project itself. The essay outlines how Labour’s ability to oscillate between operating as a digital artwork and a digital artefact is indicative of the ways visual culture is often directed towards the more fragmented, provisional, and particularized audiences reached via the internet rather than the mass audience of broadcast or televisual media (television, radio, film) that shaped earlier models of spectatorship. Outlining how Labour is undergirded by a digital logic of computational aggregation as well as by acts of storage and retrieval that are foundational to working across digital networks, this essay offers a close reading of contemporaneous yet divergent moving-image artworks that, like Labour, attempt to give shape, form, and duration to the experience of labour in the networked age.
