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Hours later I returned and was greeted. Someone had finally arrived. The temperature reached into the minuses. The artists were absent. In their place the curator, producer and art handler were huddled up around a heater trying to keep it together and make sure that the artworks got settled. They projected more warmth than the heater. Next to the scaffolding that was expected to support the works there were some personal touches to the space – backpacks, gloves, painting supplies, ladders, posters, wall lettering waiting to be pressed, there were improvised structures ready to accommodate dust, and teabags and bags.

I was told the artworks would follow, one by one:

Tytus Szabelski-Różniak’s algorithmic diagrams for resistance, yet to be carved into wooden planks that were being painted deep blue. They were almost Yves Klein blue, to the point where you could wonder whether the artist might drag out a series of liberated naked bodies through the colour and smudge them before allowing them to roll around on sheets of paper.

Nicolas Gourault’s 16-minute foray into micro-work and micro-workers that annotate images that ensure self-driving cars have a smooth ride. If you’ve ever wondered what micro-work is, think about cutting out one silhouette from an image depicting an urban scene. You click, click, click your way around it with a polygonal lasso tool in your nifty image editing software, you categorise the silhouette – human, authority figure – then your work is done, and onwards you go towards the next silhouette after no more than a couple of minutes. Gourault’s work is ultimately a research project carried out by his very own art micro-workers – since the team in charge of making up the work expands wider than just his position – and is packaged under a European Union framework, and then credited to one artist. A depiction hinting through its own working method to the content it talks about.

Sanela Jahić’s renderings of spaces of resistance; spaces where organizing takes place: An Extinction Rebellion blockade of an Amazon warehouse in the UK, accompanied by Dan McQuillan’s smooth voice talking about the struggle for better working conditions in the face of the spread of automation.

Ana-Maria Cojocaru’s looped view of empty and then decaying supermarket renderings. The before and the after, luxuriously taken over by shrubbery and flickering lights and tiles, post dystopian, pre-utopic, or what happens when constructive resistance is no longer possible and all we’re left is violent resistance or leaving it all to rot.

The works were easily accessible online. I could have comfortably watched them from the comfort of my own home and skipped a two hour each way bus, metro and train ride – why wouldn’t I? During my first visit there were only bits of wooden scaffolding, a few screens set in place and some designated locations. Nevertheless, I still felt the need to be there to better understand the works and their potential.

While I was in the space at POST, I tried to imagine what it would mean for the artists to be automated as well, not just for those in other working professions. When they do come for the artistic profession what will they go for? What could possibly be automated? What is automated already?

AI-Created Ads, AI-Driven Blueprints, AI-Generated Actors & Deepfakes, AI-Generated Music, AI-Generated Photography, AI Video Editing, Architecture & Interior Design, Automated Journalism, Auto-Mixing & Mastering, Creative Writing, Fashion Design, Logo & Graphic Design, NPCs with AI Personalities, Personalized Marketing Campaigns, SEO & Blog Writing

Much of this I’d already encountered in daily doomscrolling sessions, so my aim of visiting the exhibition was to somehow circumvent this flow of easy content. Getting to the space, settling my attention to understand each work, experiencing my body in relation to the bodies of other workers depicted, to the traces of their work, of their resistance, and experiencing the work of those setting up the works themselves, forced me to be slower, more attentive.

The artists in the show do not deal with their own obsolescence in the face of the spread of AI. Maybe assuming they’d be saved. After all they did make me come all the way to see their works in real life. The works point towards the drive of artists to lend their skills to a broader range of workers, to practice solidarity with food delivery couriers, supermarket workers, micro-task workers within the platform economy, Amazon workers and their protest movements. By amplifying struggles outside of their realm, artists could be saved from annihilation.

My second trip to Nijmegen came closer to the finishing of the exhibition set-up. This time one of the artists was present, having spent hours carving his work by hand into the blue wooden painted boards. The others were still absent.

Part of the crew had finished setting up, another part dealt with life elsewhere. I thought that ultimately, as observers of the rise and rise of AI, we started from an incorrect premise: assuming that AI was coming for our jobs, whether in manual, intellectual or creative labour. The truth was that AI doesn’t truly exist. There is no artificial, independent, thinking, conscious entity to speak of.  There is advanced computation, alongside statistical pattern recognition, and automation, which is lacking in genuine intelligence, understanding, or awareness. There are resource guzzling large machines which chew up vast amounts of data and simulate human-like responses, making us question our own humanity. There’s no emotion, inspiration and personal experience, nor innovation, nor independent agency or intention, or goals, or wants, or decision-making. There are easy scapegoats and ways for a select few to make a profit. But what we’re actually being taken over by is alienation. The idea that we must use the tools but that there’s no way of resisting our tools, that they don’t belong to us and we can’t subvert them.

I fed the generative language model one more task as I grabbed a snack, inspired by the exhibition’s title, processing my revelation among the exhibition set-up.

‘An alphabetic list of activities peasants used to do which have been automated by AI, please:’

(It’s always nice to say “please”, and “thank you”)

Animal Herding, Baking & Bread Making, Blacksmithing, Carpentry & Woodworking, Cooking & Meal Preparation, Dairy Farming, Fishing & Fish Farming, Food Preservation, Harvesting Crops, Hunting & Trapping, Irrigation & Water Management, Milling Grain, Plowing Fields, Sewing & Textile Making, Sheep Shearing, Storage & Warehousing, Tending Gardens, Tool Making, Weaving & Loom Operation, Winemaking & Brewing

“Thank you!”

The march of automation has stripped labour of its dignity, reduced skill to code, and replaced craft with computation. Or so we’re told.

This is theft disguised as progress. AI does not think, does not create, does not dream. It is a parasite, feeding on the work of the living, repackaging human effort as machine-made. The intelligence is not in the algorithm but in the choices made around it — the choice to exploit, to extract, to devalue, to concentrate power.

AI is inevitable.

Or so we’re told.

It is neutral.

Or so we’re told.

It will free us.

Or so we’re told.

In reality AI is a tool of control, wielded by those betting on exploitation, used to obscure the human labour still required to make it function. The gig worker training the model, the precarious coder refining the outputs, the underpaid annotator feeding it data, the artists filling up a funding application, the production manager making a task list, the curator cleaning up a text – they are the ghosts inside the machine, erased from the narrative.

There is no AI. There is only power. And power concedes nothing willingly.

To resist means to see the machine for what it is: a weapon of enclosure, an amplifier of alienation. To resist means to take back what is ours: our labour, our creativity, our autonomy. To resist means to refuse the easy path, to reclaim skill, to reject the passive consumption of machine-made mimicry.

To take a bus, a metro, a train, to feel the cold along the way, to stand in the space, to be present, to refuse the easy, to wait, to listen, to look, to experience frustration, to think with our bodies, to wield our own hands, to make real choices, to try, to fail.

On my third and final visit the works settled in their designated spots. The floor was spotless. I got to look at Szabelski-Różniak’s finished diagrams of resistance and hear how his dremel broke almost at the end of carving the diagrams out. I got to take a copy of Jahić’s text about resistance that accompanied her video, and question Gourault’s framing of micro-workers mini-resisting, dreaming they’d join his research assistants, editors, screenwriting advisor, image assistant, and sound editor, as well as the revolting supermarket workers in Cojocaru’s fantasy and trash their respective workspaces, regaining control. I got to feel the power of resistance in the relation between the works, and the makers, and the space, and those that care for it.