This collection of essays offers a critical assessment of Labour in a Single Shot, a groundbreaking documentary video workshop. From 2011 to 2014, curator Antje Ehmann and film- and videomaker Harun Farocki produced an art project of truly global proportions. They travelled to fifteen cities around the world to conduct workshops inspired by cinema history’s first film, Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory, shot in 1895 by the Lumière brothers in France. While the workshop videos are in colour and the camera was not required to remain static, Ehmann and Farocki’s students were tasked with honouring the original Lumière film’s basic parameters of theme and style. The fascinating result is a collection of more than 550 short videos that have appeared in international exhibitions and on an open-access website, offering the widest possible audience the opportunity to ponder contemporary labour in multiple contexts around the world.
- Cover
- Table of Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1. Foreword: Eine Einstellung zur Arbeit/Labour in a Single Shot
- 2. Labour in a Single Shot: Critical Perspectives – Editors’ Introduction
- Roy Grundmann, Peter J. Schwartz, and Gregory H. Williams
- 3. Labour in a Single Shot – Antje Ehmann’s Workshop and Exhibition Journals, 2011–2014
- History
- 4. Attitudes Towards Work: On the Historical Metamorphoses of Psychotechnology
- 5. One Shot, Two Mediums, Three Centuries
- 6. The Body and the Senses: Harun Farocki on Work and Play
- Poetics
- 7. Ten Propositions
- Dale Hudson and Patricia R. Zimmermann
- 8. Videopoetics of Labour in a Single Shot
- 9. Knowing When to Be Wary of Images
- Embodiment
- 10. Punching In/Punching Out: Labour, Care, and Leisure at Work and at Play
- 11. Labour’s Mediating Objects: Tools, Tactility, and Embodiment
- Networks
- 12. Database Labour: Supply Chains, Logistics, and Flow
- 13. Artwork and Artefact: The Networked Conditions of Labour in a Single Shot
- 14. Reading the Web Catalogue: Labour in a Single Shot as Online Environment
- Bibliography
- Index of Labour in a Single Shot workshop videos
- General Index