I see it, so you don't have to

The Jacquard loom was the first programmable machine — it too ran on invisible labour.

I see it, so you don’t have to is a 2×3 metre textile wall hanging woven on a traditional Jacquard loom. The work draws on the lived experiences of content moderators. The underpaid workers who review and filter the data that AI systems are trained on and makes their largely hidden labour visible through a physical, slowmade object.

We built a web-based display component that plays archive video footage of loom production, cycling through multiple clips in both forward and reverse. Each clip can toggle between its forward and backward version at timed intervals, so the loom’s motion appears to unspool and rewind. A mechanical loop that mirrors the repetitive, cyclical nature of the labour the work describes.

The woven image itself was produced through a process that moves between generative AI and the Jacquard loom: machine learning was used to generate a complex image, which was then translated into a weave pattern and executed on physical loom hardware. The piece places two eras of industrialised labour in direct contact — the nineteenth-century textile factory and the contemporary gig-economy data pipeline.

Shown at Mindscapes: In the company of others, MAP The Museum of Art and Photography, Bengaluru, India (2023–2024).

The artwork was developed when the artist was international artist-in-residence at the Wellcome Collection as part of Wellcome Trust’s Mindscapes program.

Thank you to the digital curatorial team and textile team at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) for their contribution in developing the work.

Thanks to the content moderators who shared their lived experiences. And a special thanks to former content moderator Selena Scola for her collaborative contribution.