Amazon (video installation)

Danielle Dean

Amazon2021
27:01 min
5 channel video installation

Amazon, examines two moments in the global history of labour. The first is Fordlândia, a former rubber plantation in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest. It was founded by Henry Ford of the Ford Motor Company in 1928 as an attempt to control rubber production. However, indigenous botany was disregarded in favour of Ford’s model of industrial production, and the rubber trees fell prey to disease. Ford also attempted to cultivate the ‘ideal worker’ through cultural assimilation, including US-style housing, dieting, and square dancing. As a result, the Brazilian workforce rebelled, and the settlement was abandoned in 1934. Dean recasts this tale of historic corporate colonialism alongside the labour- crowdsourcing marketplace Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT). Launched in 2005 by US technology company Amazon, AMT allows companies to globally outsource digital tasks. It has since grown into a mass-data harvester, fuelled by human labour. As remote workers complete tasks, they train artificial intelligence algorithms which will eventually replace them. Dean draws a parallel between AMT and Fordlândia’s industrial assembly line, although here workers are kept disconnected from each other. In Amazon, Dean invites AMT workers from around the world to collaborate with each other in ways that defy the platform’s alienating logic. Over two years, Dean and the AMT workers pored over archival material from Fordlândia to compose a film script reenacting the plantation’s revolutionary uprising.

Producer: Luisa Aguilar Solis, Alexis Hudgins
Assistant Director: Mireya Lucio
AMT Collaborators: Amy Cutler, Hunter Keels, Elizabeth Rhodes, Greg Vendramini
Cinematographer: L.F. Guizar, Conrad Jones
Editor: Amedeo Gallo
Art Director: Eligh Macias
Sound Engineer: Dean Lee
Composer: John Somers
Choreographer and dancer: Jewel
Musician: Mustafa Hameed
AI: Mireya Lucio
Entrepreneurial requester/Fordlândia manager: Danielle Dean

Included in exhibition:
Art Now, Tate Britain
This Land, The Contemporary Austin

Video still, Amazon