Amazon (Proxy) (performance)

Danielle Dean

Amazon (Proxy)2021
Live performance

Amazon (Proxy) is a commission for a live performance for Performa, premiered in October 2021 in New York. It brings together online gig workers and actors to revisit events that took place at Fordlândia, a short-lived rubber plantation established by Henry Ford in the Amazon in the 1920s. Taking place both online and in person at The Amant Foundation, the live performance builds on the historical event to create a contemporary drama that riffs on our current modes of working and socializing remotely.

Amazon (Proxy) originated during Dean’s period of research in the archives of the Ford Motor Company in Detroit, where she came across Fordlândia, a city founded in the rainforest in 1928 to control the production of rubber for Ford’s car tires and abandoned in 1934 after the workers rebelled against harsh conditions. In 2021, Dean shifts the focus to the e-commerce company Amazon and its crowdsourcing marketplace “Amazon Mechanical Turk” (AMT)—a website that makes it easier for individuals and businesses to outsource their processes and jobs to a globally distributed workforce who can perform tasks at home, on their own time. In the past decade, the website has become a platform on which humans train Artificial Intelligence (AI) in online campaigns of data collection. With its website, Amazon has reconfigured the typical Fordist assembly line into a globally fragmented yet deeply intertwined system of Turkers, all working remotely from home—a phenomenon amplified by the 2020 global lockdown.

Theatrical Direction: Mireya Lucio 
Choreography: Sandella Malloy 
Script: Danielle Dean, Mireya Lucio, and the AMT workers 
AMT Collaborators: Amy Cutler, Hunter Keels, Elizabeth Rhodes, and Greg Vendramini 
Performers: Emily Barkovic, Austin Davis, Ava Rose Paul, Manik Singh
Musical performance: Mustafa Faruki

Included in exhibition:
Amazon (Proxy), Performa

Live performance, Amazon Proxy, Performa
Photo: Paula Court