{"id":1868910,"date":"2026-04-06T13:50:54","date_gmt":"2026-04-06T10:50:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1868910"},"modified":"2026-04-06T13:50:54","modified_gmt":"2026-04-06T10:50:54","slug":"new-museum-new-humans-exhibition-human-labor-vs-the-machines","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1868910","title":{"rendered":"New Museum ‘New Humans’ Exhibition: Human Labor vs. the Machines"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\n\tIn the beginning, there was a lot of work to do.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tIn the Mesopotamian creation myth, the Anunnaki, the Big Gods, and the Igigi, the Little Gods, drew sticks to decide who would do the hard labor of digging the channel that would become the Euphrates river. It was the Igigi who drew the short stick. For 3,600 years they worked, crying out to the big gods for relief but never being answered. Nusku encouraged his fellow Igigi to rebel by setting fire to their tools and surrounding the house of Ellil, an Anunnaki leader and their foreman. Nusku and the Igigi told Ellil that for too long their pain had been ignored and that something had to change. Ellil brought this message to his fellow Anunnaki, who decided that Nusku and the Igigi should be killed. <\/p>\n

\n\tBut Ea, the god of wisdom, offered a different solution: create mankind to take on the Igigi\u2019s labor. Ea summoned the womb-goddess Belet-ili to create man from clay, divine spit, and the heart of the rebellious Nusku.\u00a0 When the task is done she says, \u201c[We] have slaughtered a god together with his intelligence. I have relieved you of your hard work, I have imposed your load on man.\u201d By sacrificing Nusku, it is said, a \u201cghost came into existence.\u201d And thus Nusku\u2019s heart beats on in every human being so that he is never forgotten\u2014and so that one day, mankind might also rebel.<\/p>\n

\n\tThat story played in my mind as I walked through \u201cNew Humans: Memories of the Future,\u201d the inaugural exhibition at the recently renovated New Museum. Across four floors and over 700 works, the show felt like a continuation of the epic story of labor that began over 4,000 years ago. If the creation of a new labor force once required the sacrifice of the worker-god to animate worker-humans, pieces from this exhibition show artists working to interpret how the worker-human has been continuously sacrificed to animate our new worker-machines.<\/p>\n

\n\tThis narrative is most clearly laid out in a section of \u201cNew Humans\u201d titled \u201cMechanical Ballets,\u201d referencing Bauhausler Oskar Schlemmer\u2019s Das mechanische Ballett<\/em> (1923) and Das triadische Ballett<\/em> (1922). Both of these ballets feature dancers wearing stiff, geometrically inspired costumes that obscure their bodies and constrain their movements. These dances came at a time in Germany when artists were wrestling with the scars of World War I and the intensification of the developing industrial economy. Sent to war, and then the factories, artists conjured visions of human life reduced to mere machinery.<\/p>\n

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F.W. Bogler, Kurt Schmidt, and Georg Teltscher, Reconstruction of Das mechanische Ballett (The Mechanical Ballet)<\/em>, Theater der Kl\u00e4nge, D\u00fcsseldorf, 1923\/1987. Restaged by J\u00f6rg U. Lensing, Udo Lensing, and Ernst Merheim at Bauhaus Dessau in 2009.<\/span>Courtesy New Museum\/Oliver Eltinger<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tDown the hall from \u201cMechanical Ballets\u201d stands John Heartfield and George Grosz\u2019s 1920 sculpture The Middle-Class Philistine Heartfield Gone Wild (Mechanical Tatlin Sculpture)<\/em>. Built around a tailor\u2019s dummy, the work represents a population remade, perhaps too willingly, from an object of warfare into a tool of commodity production. A revolver and military paraphernalia stud the dummy\u2019s chest, a pair of plaster dentures serve as a perverse fig-leaf, a leg is replaced with a rod, and a single shining lightbulb crowns the whole hybrid mess in place of a head. The work\u2019s abundance of prosthetics reflects a nascent vision of the hybrid man\u2014part human, part machine\u2014no doubt inspired by the amputees flooding back from the front.<\/p>\n

\n\tA work that is crucial to contextualize this era is the play R.U.R. (Rossum\u2019s Universal Robots)<\/em> by the Czech playwright Karel \u010capek. As wall text for \u201cMechanical Ballets\u201d explains. it was \u010capek who first came up with the name \u201crobot\u201d from the Czech robota<\/em>, which translates to \u201cforced labor.\u201d In \u010capek\u2019s play, artificial humans are designed by the scientist Rossum, who made the most efficient version of the worker possible so that it should be cheap to produce and maintain, enormously intelligent, but lacking a soul. But as these robots are allowed to become more emotionally complex, they rebel, wiping out the majority of humanity. Instead of serving their gods, they kill them. We might read into the differences between the Mesopotamian creation myth and \u010capek\u2019s play, the historical process of class consciousness at work.<\/p>\n

\n\tYet there is another question being posed by R.U.R.<\/em> and the art of the 1920s more broadly: as workers sacrifice their humanity to become more efficient in the factory, is the human being changed into something else (i.e., the cyborg), or are these efforts feeding the creation of another being entirely (i.e., the autonomous robot)? Should we take the robots of \u010capek\u2019s play to be a metaphor of the working class, or do they really represent a different kind of life form?<\/p>\n

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George Grosz\u2019s 1920 sculpture The Middle-Class Philistine Heartfield Gone Wild (Mechanical Tatlin Sculpture)<\/em> on view in \u201cNew Humans\u201d at the New Museum.<\/span>Shanti Escalante-De Mattei<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tLet\u2019s skip forward a hundred years or so to see how these questions have developed as capitalism has produced new modes of production which, in turn, mold new kinds of subjectivities.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn one of the newest works on view in \u201cNew Humans,\u201d German artist Hito Steyerl tackles the hidden labor of A.I. in the 2025 video work Mechanical Kurds<\/em>, which tells the story of Kurdish workers who participate in Amazon\u2019s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) workforce.<\/p>\n

\n\tAmazon named this program after a chess-playing automaton that made its debut at Vienna\u2019s Sch\u00f6nbrunn Palace in 1770. Dressed like a stereotypical \u201cTurk,\u201d the supposed machine toured Europe and North America for 80 years before it was revealed that it was actually operated by a grandmaster covertly stowed in a compartment below the board. MTurk, as per Amazon\u2019s website, is \u201ca crowdsourcing marketplace\u201d that allows companies to access a distributed, global workforce that completes \u201cmicrotasks.\u201d MTurk is often used for the image-labeling tasks that are necessary for training AI. In Steyerl\u2019s film, she interviews Kurdish workers in northern Iraq\u2019s Domiz refugee camp who have taken on these microtasks. They express an ambivalent but basically positive attitude about the program.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt was an income. Even if it was not a good one it was something,\u201d one woman says, lamenting that most of the microwork had dried up already.<\/p>\n

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Still from Hito Steyerl, Mechanical Kurds,<\/em> 2025. <\/span>Courtesy the artist and Andrew Kreps, New York. Commissioned by the Jeu de Paume, Paris, and New Museum, New York<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tThe video shows the unpaved streets of Domiz as Steyerl\u2019s subjects describe labeling objects in images and videos from around the world. They guess where these places might be\u2014e.g., Switzerland, China, and the US\u2014and the AI imagery morphs to provide a facsimile of each place. They think they\u2019ve been helping design self-driving drones and tuk-tuks (three-wheeled motorcycles), but they\u2019re not sure. This ambivalent speech is contrasted with the severe consequences of AI when Steyerl interviews an Iraqi journalist who was the subject of a drone attack, along with two colleagues who did not survive. Yet Steyerl returns to the hope that the refugees have for AI. As one man flies a toy drone, surrounded by children, his voice echoes out, \u201cThe future, the future, the future, it is all the same\u2014another world.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tNeither serving the gods nor rebelling against them, Steyerl paints a haunting picture of what seems like the last task of automation: a bit more of the ghost needed to animate the machine is extracted from human cognitive labor. Then the project flees to its secret laboratories, leaving the refugees of Domiz to continue the task of survival in some other way.<\/p>\n

\n\tIf the artists of the postwar period were coping with the brutality of how capitalism was changing what it meant to be human, it seems we are now in a profoundly different time, when artists are trying to understand who we are, as AI and automation seem to make workers increasingly obsolete. The labor not yet automated is fragmented, meaningless, and nearly ready for AI takeover. I mean, who even calls themselves a worker anymore?<\/p>\n

\n\tTake, for example, Kristin Walsh\u2019s Engine No. 15<\/em> (2025). A sleek aluminum sculpture, its shape recalls a component of a machine, perhaps found in a car or in a factory, yet it is a completely closed system. Little matchsticks lie flat on its surface, and then suddenly pop up and jitter across its surface, only to fall again, in seeming exhaustion. In the wall text, Walsh describes the matches \u201cas actors on a stage, laboriously set up to basically perform no function.\u201d It\u2019s like the sculptural rendition of David Graeber\u2019s Bullshit Jobs<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\n\tAn echo of these matches lies in Human Mask<\/em> (2014), a haunting video work by Pierre Huyghe, set in Fukushima after the destruction wrought by the tsunami and then the breakdown of the nuclear reactor. In a partially collapsed restaurant, a monkey wearing a grey dress and the white mask of a young woman with long black hair bides her time. It rains. The kitchen of the restaurant is crawling with maggots, the damp eats away at the tatami mats and wallpaper decorated with a design of a forest landscape. The monkey sits, swinging its leg. In another scene, it knocks a glass off a table. It walks into the kitchen and finds food. It twirls in the middle of the dining area until it gets dizzy and collapses. Huyghe sourced the monkey from Tokyo, where it had been trained to work as a server in a restaurant. Is this the future? Abandoned by the work that shaped us, abandoned by gods and robots both, will we act out the phantom vestiges of our skills in the ruined margins of the world?\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tBut look at how I speak of this future: as something coming. Being an irrelevant subject in the production of capital is an increasingly common positionality\u2014and this is especially true for people who have been displaced by war or whose national economy has been significantly reordered by neoliberal reform. The conditions in Domiz are not scary as a sign of what the future might be like for everyone. It is scary that that kind of displacement provides the exact kind of population needed for microwork today<\/em>. A tech optimist might read this form of labor as a necessary and basically painless offering needed to make that creature which can take on our human labors, as the Annunaki once did for the Igigi. But let\u2019s not avoid the obvious: who do you think wrote that old story? Seems to me like yet another history written by the victors.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/Link-Rot.jpg?w=1024″] In the beginning, there was a lot of work to do.\u00a0 In the Mesopotamian creation myth, the Anunnaki, the Big Gods, and the Igigi, the Little Gods, drew sticks to decide who would do the hard labor of digging the channel that would become the Euphrates river. It was the Igigi who […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1868910","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1868910","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1868910"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1868910\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1868910"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1868910"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1868910"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}