A Location in Parts

Abstract

This thesis frames decapitation and re-capitation as conceptual and creative spring boards to help re-think and re-align fictions around online gig economies, their attendant labor practices, and notions of time and space in the digital workplace. Though many of the examples from this document are specific to the Indian context and the Global South, they are also acutely relevant to multiple Local Souths. This thesis updates the discourse on gig labor by examining the subject through the lens of myth, the non-human, multi-player gaming, myth and storytelling. Through applying an artistic methodology that both implicates and embraces Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform as collaborator, this thesis explores notions of sovereignty, fictional edges of protest, scientific discoveries, digital-terrestrial play, and image making and reading. As such this thesis asks what kinds of fictions and relationships can be born out of investigating these contemporary rifts in labor practices, and whether conceptual nodes of thinking the ‘outlandish’ can help us create new (er) pasts, presents and futures with greater empathy.