Place of Toil, 2023
Sami Hopkins & S. Warren
HD video (color, sound) 33:15 minutes




Set in a virtual workspace, Place of Toil mirrors the spatial container of online work, where personal experience and contract labor intermingle through their shared digitization and surveillance. Audio-processed interviews with participants—detailing bodily and emotional impacts of work—are transformed into a noisescape. Place of Toil combines qualitative data and noise to assess the intersections of disability, labor, space, and participants’ agency in their representation. Developed from a 2017 text-based installation, the recorded performance explores “noise neutrality,” a methodology co-developed with S. Warren that values harsh noise as a normative and aesthetic framework for artistic research.

Commissioned by ISSUE Project Room, New York. (See program webpage)