Xtine Burrough
(2022)
3:00 minutes
Video Documentation for a Screen-Saver
Women’s Work is (Screen) Saved shares reflections on balancing work, life, and motherhood written by women workers from Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk in December 2020. Presented as a screensaver, the work transforms reflections from 100 women into a set of virtual postcards. Women wrote how their lives were profoundly changed, and the screensaver images illustrate the variety of effects the pandemic has had on women around the globe including physical changes, anxiety, and grief. Reflecting on her grandchildren, one worker wrote, “You can’t hug through Zoom.” This work re-imagines collected texts from women workers (ghosts in the machine) as postcards from the virtual factory. Viewing their words on a screensaver reminds us of those screens we could not hug through during the pandemic. It is no accident that their voices are active while the rest of the machine is at rest.