Amalia Lindo
(b. 1990, United States. Lives and works in Melbourne)

Amalia Lindo is a multi-disciplinary artist concerned with the impacts of human-machine interaction in the context of automation. Primarily working with video and installation, her work includes video material sourced from social networking and crowdsourcing platforms to examine how automated technologies displace human labour by blurring the boundaries between ‘work’ and ‘consumption’.

In her large-scale commission for Melbourne Now, Lindo continues her ongoing investigation into the Amazon-owned crowdsourcing platform known as ‘Mechanical Turk’ (MTurk) – a ‘crowdsourcing marketplace’ for outsourcing digital micro-tasks (known as Human Intelligence Tasks, or HITs) to humans. On MTurk, businesses, organisations and researchers can solicit human workers to complete HITs, typically consisting of repetitive tasks, such as tagging, analysing and categorising images and text. Principally, MTurk provides tech companies with cost-effective access to a 24/7 human workforce capable of generating the training data used to train artificial intelligence algorithms.

For Telltale: Economies of Time, 2022–23, Lindo commissioned 1820 anonymous and globally distributed MTurk workers over twelve months to submit a short video sequence in response to the video submitted by the worker before them. The result is an unfolding chain-mail-style narrative, presented as an immersive visual and sonic experience that reflects the collaborative and social nature of AI through the lens of its ‘invisible’ contributors. As a durational and collective exercise, this project operates as a tell-tale for the evolution of the algorithm – an economic process that has divided human time, space and labour throughout recent history. 

Lindo completed a Bachelor of Fine Art (First Class Honours) in 2016 and is a current PhD candidate at MADA (Monash Art, Design and Architecture at Monash University). She has exhibited solo at Melbourne’s Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP), BLINDSIDE and c3 Contemporary Art Space, and participated in the Spring 1882 Art Fair in 2021. Lindo is represented by Haydens, Melbourne.