Fixtures establishes a symbolic relationship between my family’s experiences and the socio-economic realities of 21st century blue collar workers. A broken porcelain handle my father excavated from the leveled American Standard plant becomes his surrogate. It is surrounded by 200 digitally fabricated PVA and porcelain replicas that were produced as stand-in’s that point to the anonymous millions that share his experience of displacement. Each copy is manufactured through the automated processes of 3D scanning and 3D printing, technologies frequently used in present day manufacturing. When combined with the original, these newly minted artifacts erect an abstracted, piecemeal, industrial ruin.

Fixtures

Restitutions questions value and ownership in both virtual and physical space by replacing physical artifacts with virtual and artificial forms. The word restitution means both a restoration of something lost or stolen to its rightful owner, and a compensation for an injury or loss. 

Restitutions refers directly to this act of returning while also calling attention to those who settled out of court in 2015 after the 2007 closure of the American Standard pottery. Through the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act, the U.S Department of Labor requires a plant to give its workers a minimum of 60 days notice before closing its doors. My father was one of 165 hourly production workers who lost their job at that factory with only 16 days notice. In the end, he received compensation in the form of $1,856.13 from American Standard Companies Inc.

22 original porcelain artifacts were culled from Tiffin, Ohio’s, former American Standard plant by my father and I. They were then 3D scanned, archived and reproduced off-site. By implementing augmented reality, I have digitally returned these relics to their original resting place. The documentation of this act is displayed alongside the 3D printed reproductions of the ceramic artifacts. This process virtually restores and physically emulates broken porcelain– long forgotten and then removed, while drawing attention to the conspicuously missing ceramics themselves. 

Restitutions

Campaign reverses power structures by placing the viewer in front of the teleprompter as opposed to behind it. The scrolling text is pulled directly from both John McCain and Barack Obama’s National Convention acceptance speeches (2008) and Levi’s Go Forth advertising campaign from that same year. Copy from all three sources was written in direct response to the 2008 housing market crash and intended for a blue collar audience. The language is generic to the point that the sentences become interchangeable, a tactic I have employed within the piece. Their message is vague but clear: work hard, fight hard, and reclaim what is rightfully yours (the American Dream). Merging the three separate texts into one (not so) new campaign speech blurs party lines with capitalistic agendas to reveal lofty ideals with no real solution.

Campaign

Shuttered tells an industrial narrative through incessant audio and visual repetition that mirrors the monotonous labor of the factory floor. A shape reminiscent of shattered glass is systematically filled with over two thousand windows that have been sourced from the homes and businesses surrounding abandoned factories in the Rust Belt. Audio from an automotive factory’s floor accompanies the gathering of windows, while sounds of broken glass and demolition signal their retreat. 

Serving as a topographical map of a transitory place, each point denotes one of twenty-seven cities (Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, etc.) that have suffered traumatic loss of industry (and consequently population) since 2000. Spaces that once bustled with life and the promise of the American Dream now stand vacant and vandalized, a reminder of the moment before global capitalism took hold. The windows promise a glimpse into the domestic lives of former employees that they cannot deliver. Instead, they build upon one another to tell the story of American deindustrialization through accumulation and abstraction.

Shuttered

In Lights Out, I utilize machine learning to render visible the intangible state of America’s labor force. The term lights out manufacturing refers to a fully automated factory that requires no human presence on site, operating without heating, air conditioning, lunch breaks or unions. Similarly, the portraits in Lights Out are not real people, rather, they are deep fakes created by artificial intelligence utilizing a neural network. This neural network was trained using a dataset of 50,000 pictures of factory workers that I sourced through facebook. I empower the machine to visualize those it has replaced by employing these found identities to teach the algorithm to see, interpret and render out its own assembly of laborers. As the neural network is fed more portraits to analyze, its deep fakes become more believable, resulting in a new labor force of 60,000 - one worker for each factory shuttered since 2000. The AI generated faces have been meticulously organized into columns that slowly shift up and down the gallery wall. The monotonous, machine-like rhythm created by this vertical assembly line mimics that of a conveyor belt, symbolically placing the portraits in dialog with capitalist commodities.

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Kaitlyn Jo Smith