Worknoise, 2024
Title: Worknoise / Munkazaj
HD digital video with self-composed sound, performance, glitch techniques – 1280 × 720 px, duration: 2’34”
Worknoise is a densely structured conceptual video piece that navigates the liminal zones between physical labor, digital manipulation, and aesthetic abstraction. At once documentary and interpretive, the work reframes the gestures and sounds of manual processes within a radically recontextualized artistic space. Central to the composition is a photograph from the artist’s personal archive, depicting a sickle and hammer – not as ideological symbols, but as archetypal signifiers of the relationship between body and tool. This image recurs throughout the video as a thematic anchor. Visually, the screen is divided into nine segments playing simultaneously, forming a dynamic matrix that expresses labor’s temporal rhythm through a nonlinear, yet organically unfolding visual logic.
The artistic approach blends glitch aesthetics with techniques of digital collage and audiovisual performance. Footage of the artist’s own working processes – sawing, carving, painting, nailing, assembling – has been manipulated through speed shifts and distortions, creating layers of abstraction across the segmented frame. These visual matrices, often fractured through effects reminiscent of glass brick refraction or pixel disintegration, are synchronized with a self-composed soundscape built from the raw noises of the actions depicted. The result is a noise-techno composition in which rhythm emerges directly from the materiality of labor. Here, sound is not mere accompaniment but the sonic sublimation of physical effort.
Positioned at the intersection of digital visual art, performative documentation, and experimental sound practice, Worknoise raises reflective questions about the social and spiritual dimensions of labor. The “profane” gestures of manual work are elevated into a meditative, almost transformative state. The focus on presence, repetition, and rhythm evokes a Zen-like sensibility – grounded, attentive, and free from affectation. The piece oscillates between the corporeal and the transcendent, proposing a space where work becomes both ritual and reflection.
The recurring image of the sickle and hammer – used here devoid of ideological intent – activates historical layers and cultural memory, calling attention to the shifting symbolic roles of labor in society. As a motif, it bridges craftsmanship, production, and artistic creation, underscoring, with a touch of irony, how work may simultaneously become a political, aesthetic, and spiritual act. Glitches, digital noise, and visual errors are not decorative anomalies, but signifiers of malfunctioning systems and overstretched structures that define the contemporary condition.
Ultimately, Worknoise is more than a video – it is a hybrid media work that employs performance, digital imagery, and sound art to articulate complex relationships between labor and creation, the body and technology, the everyday and the sacred. Within the context of contemporary art discourse, it functions not only as a formal innovation, but also as a philosophical and sociopolitical reflection.
Click to watch the audiovisual work in full