Summary

Workers’ Forum is an animated message conversation, the idea for which developed from Takala’s experience as a micro-tasker in the United States, in which she worked for a service where users pay to have a pretend girlfriend or boyfriend texting them. Through a crowdsourcing platform, the artist responded to the task ‘Write a text message that is positive, engaging and convincingly written in the voice of someone texting a significant other.’ The video is based on conversations that took place in a discussion forum between the micro-taskers, trying to figure out together how to be an invisible partner. Micro-taskers receive small chunks of large jobs as part-time workers, offering a cheap supply of labour for online enterprises.