With each gesture we make and every act we undertake, we transfer information; information that is part of our interaction with the people who are close to us and with the institutions and concepts that define our society. In the past these processes mostly occurred between one human and another, without an intermediary. Only the most important communications where recorded and archived, in contracts, treaties, paintings, or books. With technological developments in the twentieth century, the invention of the internet and the rise of big data, this situation has changed radically. We have created systems that record and archive almost everything we do, and virtual realms to mirror the physical world we live in. We’ve filled our habitats with datafied objects and more and more we have become sets of data ourselves. What we do and how we express ourselves is tracked, quantified, and coded. The datafied individual is categorized and stored in massive databases that are built and managed by companies and governments. They tell us that they want to “connect us” and provide us with better services, but they are also there to make profit and control us. We are allowing ourselves to be commodified and manipulated in systems of predictive analytics and micro-targeting, and the amount of private data we are handing over every day of our lives is unprecedented. What will happen now that the way these systems function is determined more and more by artificial intelligence and algorithms?

Smart phones, search engines, online shopping and social networks have become essential to our everyday lives. The impact that our deep emotional relationship to electronic media has on how we spend our time at home and in the workplace is explored in Fast-Paced Planet with a selection of historical industrial and documentary films. Thomas Imbach’s Well Done examines computerized office work in a large-scale Swiss financial services company and the serial logic of the system that is ingrained in employees’ bodies and language. The data centre dictates the tempo that must be maintained in order to prevent a collapse. The Telefunken company’s film Sieben Briefe pro Sekunde [Seven Letters per Second] from the year 1961 shows how the postal system was modernized through the introduction of automatic sorting machines. A single error would bring the high-velocity machines to a halt. A machine-like routine of human activity is depicted in Jürgen Böttcher’s Rangierer [Shunter]. While the information received via a telex machine reveals the working processes in the Dresden-Friedrichstadt railyard to be part of a highly advanced system, the methodicalness of the workers’ movements belies the immense time pressure exerted by the modern organization of labour. In Well Done it is the ironic remarks, facial expressions and pauses that interrupt the Kafkaesque vision of a completely digitalized world and unveil a human-machine relationship that will never allow itself to be completely planned and exploited.