Andrew Norman Wilson’s Workers Leaving the Googleplex

Andrew Norman Wilson’s Workers Leaving the Googleplex screened here August 24–September 7, 2022. The video is no longer available for streaming. Join us for the next Hyundai Card Video Views screening, beginning September 22, 2022.

In his video installation Workers Leaving the Googleplex, Andrew Norman Wilson—who was hired as a contractor at Google in 2007—investigates the acute stratification of the company’s employees. As an employee with a proper red ID badge, Wilson was invited to take advantage of the corporate benefits and perks offered by Google, from Thai massages to gourmet meals. He soon noticed the existence of a marginalized class of yellow-badged workers whose job it was to scan and digitize printed matter for Google Books, and who were excluded from the privileges their red-badged colleagues enjoyed. In Wilson’s words, “Most of them are people of color and are supposedly involved in the labor of digitizing information. I’m interested in issues of class, race, and labor, and so out of general curiosity I wanted to ask these workers about their jobs.” Wilson’s film documents these employees walking to and from the ScanOps buildings, an apt reference to the Lumière Brothers’ Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory (1895) situating the film within a broader context of motion picture history.

Workers Leaving the Googleplex highlights two of the interconnected networks of human labor and data that define contemporary production practices. These are among the themes explored in Gallery 216: Systems, where the installation is currently on view. I recently spoke with Wilson via Zoom about how the work was conceived and its relationship to networks of production and exploitation. Join us in September for the next installment of the Hyundai Card Video Views series, which considers artists’ engagement with a technology that has become central to our daily lives.
—Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator, Department of Architecture and Design, and Director, Research and Development

Paola Antonelli: Norman, we can start by talking about the process of making Workers Leaving the Googleplex. How and in what ways did you first start considering Google’s labor policies as a topic for your own work?

Andrew Norman Wilson: From 2008 to 2009, I worked as a video producer for Google at their headquarters in Mountain View, California. During lunch breaks I often enjoyed perks like the endless swimming machine and private Thai massages and talks by Anthony Bourdain or Henry Kissinger or Barack Obama. Too skeptical to make many friends there, I frequently rode my electric scooter around campus to systematically sample the offerings at each of the 19 cafés, and then take advantage of the arsenal of targeted functions on the Japanese toilets in every bathroom.

After lunch every day, something would happen outside of the building next to mine at precisely 2:15 p.m. At first it registered as an unusual shape, with unusual colors and an unidentifiable cause, passing me by like clockwork. I came to realize that it was the same group of workers, mostly Black and Latino, on a campus of mostly white and Asian employees, walking out of an exit like a factory bell had just gone off. Sequestered at the outer limits of campus, they would all get into their own cars: not Google shuttles like the rest of us. Hanging from their belts were yellow badges, a color I had not noticed before among the white badges of full-timers, the red badges of contractors, and the green badges of the interns.

I started to obsess a little. I mined all the information about the yellow badges that I could from Google’s intranet, which led me to the internal name for the team—ScanOps. This class of workers, who left the building much like the industrial proletariat of a bygone era, actually performed the Fordist labor of digitization for Google Books—“scanning” printed matter from the area’s university libraries page by page on V-shaped tables with two DSLR cameras mounted overhead. I found some vague meeting notes, probably left visible by accident, about how they would be excluded from all standard privileges like cafés, bikes, shuttles, and even access to other buildings. This was a fairly commonplace result of hierarchical organization at a corporate multinational, but why was this class of workers denied the privileges that even the kitchen and custodial staff had access to, and why did it seem so secretive?

Google’s proprietary book-scanning technology. 2004. Patent number 7508978

Andrew Norman Wilson. Workers Leaving the Googleplex. 2011

One day during lunch I set up a camera and tripod in a few places around the center of campus and recorded white, red, and green badged employees coming and going. The next day I set up in front of the ScanOps building right before the workers’ shift ended, and recorded their exit. The day after, I sat near the Google sign outside the building and introduced myself to a few of them, offering my card and saying that I worked next door and would love to hear more about their work. The goal here was to get to know them, and then incorporate their perspectives into the video.

The film’s title, Workers Leaving the Googleplex, relates to two preexisting films, the Lumière Brothers’ Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory (1895) and its remake by the German filmmaker Harun Farocki (1995). Can you discuss some of these influences and connections?

In Farocki’s film he discusses how, in the Lumière Brothers’ film, the primary aim was to represent motion with an emerging technology. Yet we have come to recognize that moving images not only represent movement, but can also grasp for concepts. This is what Farocki’s film is about—how signs and symbols are taken from reality, as if “the world itself wanted to tell us something.” He uses a particular motif in film history—that of workers leaving the factory.

With my video, I wanted to contrast the movement of the ScanOps “factory” workers with other classes of employees to demonstrate how corporate hierarchy scripts different forms of movement on campus. While the white-, red-, and green-badged employees move freely between offices, cafés, and shuttle buses, the ScanOps workers leave the Google Books factory much like the workers leaving the Lumières’ photographic plates factory. My voiceover represents the limited perspective I had on what is seen, and acknowledges the camera as a stand-in for my body.

The Lumieres’ film was shot on silent black-and-white film and lasts 46 seconds, because that’s what a 17-meter film reel allows at 16 frames per second. Workers Leaving the Googleplex also presents the technological conditions of its time. It was shot in digital, high-definition color video and exported with audio. Multiple images are spatially montaged within the frame simultaneously, and it exists online for immediate access.

Sortie d’usine (Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory). 1895. France. Directed by Louis Lumière

How did Google react to your film?

The day after shooting the video, I was fired. Management said that it was for using company video equipment on company time for a personal project. Google’s legal team said it was for snooping around the legally contentious Google Books project. But it’s pretty obvious to me that my attempt to draw attention to the fact that this supposedly revolutionary company contained a decidedly unrevolutionary caste system had to be dealt with in the old-fashioned way.

For two years I sat on the footage because of the nondisclosure and employment termination agreements I had signed. During that time, I started identifying as an artist and ended up in a graduate MFA program. I attended a Scholarship Intensive at the Banff Center, where I met a Canadian lawyer who claimed that because Google Books was already such a legally contentious project when it came to copyright law, and because he imagined many viewers would respond with commiseration, Google wouldn’t pursue legal action against an individual with nothing to lose.

I took his advice. My 11-minute drab-core video essay was played over 80,000 times on the day Gizmodo and Gawker picked it up. Google never responded. Its only public statement was a now-deleted tweet by Marissa Meyer, at the time a vice president of Product Search: “Interesting perspective,” she wrote, and linked to the video.

Andrew Norman Wilson. Workers Leaving the Googleplex. 2011

Installation view of the Systems gallery, photographed in June 2022

Workers Leaving the Googleplex is currently on view in MoMA’s gallery Systems, which focuses on networks of production and extraction, and on the tools of design used to visualize and respond to them, often with broader implications about class, race, and labor. Do you consider the film a part of these networks?

In the ways labor has been represented throughout the history of photographic art—from Hans Haacke to Martha Rosler to Allan Sekula—there is a dominant insistence that an image is meant to be looked at literally for the information it contains, whereby coded messages create the possibility of an oppositional alternative to whatever plagues ordinary life or aesthetics (most often some form of “the man”).

But what this kind of work entails is a fantasy of escape—a long tradition of humanism that believes it can step outside the systems of commodification we live within. Meanwhile, Google and Facebook are building a vast machine for converting every oppositional vector (of thought, action, posture, image…anything that leaves a trace) into a curve that bends right back to that very machine. A new input for a more personalized output. It does so not by preventing people from having faith in opposition as a mode of critical thought, but by allowing and even encouraging that faith. It is a faith that people can gather around in optimism or critical pessimism, even while this machine builds parallel forms of collectivity that turn all action, all stances, no matter how oppositional, into capital accumulation built from preferences, affinities, and likes. The belief that subjectivity is somehow foreign to these circuits is a humanist fantasy—at this point we are informational capital. Google, as we know it and use it, is a factory.

After Workers Leaving the Googleplex, I made a project called ScanOps, based on Google Books images in which software distortions, the scanning site, and the hands of the ScanOps employees who digitize the books for Google are visible. Unlike prior forms of oppositional art that offer images of the realm of alienated and distant labor, these images are that realm—they are of it and in it. They emerge directly from the production of the Google Books database, and are the sources of all sorts of ongoing monetization and speculation.

Andrew Norman Wilson. ScanOps. 2012

You made Workers Leaving the Googleplex over a decade ago. How has your understanding of this work, and of the issues it brings to light, evolved over the past decade?

Workers Leaving the Googleplex emerged from a way of working that was geared toward socially productive outcomes. It didn’t necessarily represent social processes so much as it sought to actively participate in and affect the course of what is called corporate globalization: labor contracts and conditions, networked communications, flows of capital, commercial imagery, etc. Other instances of this way of working include paying a Bangalore-based “virtual” assistant to tell me what to do (Virtual Assistance, 2009–11) and founding a critical stock image production company (SONE, 2013–15).

However, the work started to feel dishonest, as it had momentum almost exclusively within what could be called the cottage industry of critical art. The most tangible outcome of this explicitly politicized practice seemed to be exhibitions, lectures, and press that connected me to a highly educated audience that already agreed with me. As someone with a background in activism and documentary and, now, a decade of experience in the art world, I’m honestly sickened by the current proliferation of bad-faith gestures toward political change and the aestheticized consumption of other people’s suffering.

Media and Performance at MoMA is made possible by Hyundai Card.

Major support is provided by MoMA’s Wallis Annenberg Director’s Fund for Innovation in Contemporary Art.

Generous funding is provided by the Lonti Ebers Endowment for Performance and the Sarah Arison Endowment Fund for Performance.