Thermal Runaways: Labor, Extraction, and Circuits of Exhaustion

Den här presentationen utforskar hur gigekonomin skapar en utarmningscykel, där den fysiska utmattningen hos matbud kopplas till den miljöförstöring som orsakas av litiumutvinning – vilken driver deras elcyklar. Samtalet sker på engelska.

Thermal Runaways: Labor, Extraction, and Circuits of Exhaustion by fields harrington, moderated by Cathryn Klasto, programmed as part of the 6th biennial PARSE artistic research conference “Some Like it Hot”.

Drawing from harrington’s ongoing research and documentation of e-bikes used by New York City’s delivery workforce, harrington examines how delivery riders are reduced to avatars—data points governed by impersonal algorithms—while miners, under exploitative conditions, extract the very lithium that powers these e-bikes.

The physical exertion of the delivery workers and the environmental devastation wrought by lithium mining share a critical material relationship: both are driven toward depletion in service of platform capital’s uninterrupted flow of commodities. This project traces that entanglement, revealing how thermal violence—the heat of bodily fatigue, resource extraction, and ecological collapse—structures contemporary platform economies.

fields harrington (b. 1986) is a New York artist who examines how knowledge systems, technologies, and infrastructures often regarded as neutral are embedded with ideologies of race, value, and power.

Cathryn Klasto is an artistic researcher, spatial theorist and educator. They are currently a senior lecturer at HDK-Valand, Academy of Art and Design at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.

Before your visit

Drop-in, no pre-registration required. Limited seating available.

Image: blue_whitebag, 2024, fields harrington.