TABOO - TRANSGRESSION - TRANSCENDENCE

This paper addresses the labour of audio transcription for AI projects (one of the basic data entry jobs that ground the current rise of AI) as a performative process of spectatorship. While acknowledging the importance of theoretical discourses that unpack the social and political implications of AI data work in terms of exploitation of cheap labour, I will give here a situated, playful account based on my personal experience as a transcriber.

My main contention is that the labour of audio transcription—with its quantifiable targets and strict rules (algorithms)—is permeated by a background work of imagination which, despite one’s best intentions to focus on the productive task at hand, weaves out useless, surreal, fragmentary landscapes (audio, visual, haptic, affective) that remain singular, unshareable imaginary experiences. I argue that addressing these imaginary artworks that emerge in the process of transcription can constitute a (small) impulse towards valuing those folds in our environments that escape the possibility of being captured in faithful representations and reified as data.

In making this argument I take my clue from the 'imaginary music' proposed in the 1970s by Romanian avant-garde composer Octavian Nemescu, who experimented with the creation of scores that were not intended to be played by musicians but performed by spectators in their own imagination—a practice that, among other things, was a dissident response to the political control of art/music in Romania in certain periods of the communist dictatorship. Challenging the taboo of speaking about AI data work from within (workers are bound by undisclosure agreements), this paper advocates for valuing the imaginary experiences of transcribers as artworks in their own right, infrathin (dis)orienting glitches in the context of the work-entertainment system that they are inscribed in.