Actors’ views : Fred Turner

For our 42th “Aux Sources du Numérique” conference, we had the chance to welcome Fred Turner, professor of communication sciences at Stanford University, author of L’usage de l’art de Burning Man à Facebook : art, technologie et management dans la Silicon Valley. This book consists of two articles translated into French by C&F éditions : “Burning Man at Google: A Cultural Infrastructure for New Media Production” and “The Arts at Facebook: An Aesthetic Infrastructure for Surveillance Capitalism”. It focuses on the relationship between art and technology in 2021.

Yet, Fred Turner notices a change in the use of art by tech companies nowadays such as Facebook, who gives artists-in-residence carte blanche to dress up its offices around the world, or Google, who asks employees to prepare artistic performances for the festival Burning Man. Fred Turner sees this new approach as a way to use art in the service of a corporate culture and a managerial model, where there is no boundary between private and professional life. We discussed these issues with him.

Why are tech companies interested in art? What’s the specificity of the new generation of Silicon Valley companies in this regard?

Well, not all Silicon Valley tech companies are interested in art. But many are and have been since Palo Alto’s Xerox PARC research center started an artist-in-residence program in the late 1990s. The companies that have art programs today tend to use them managerially.

At Facebook’s Silicon Valley headquarters, for instance, the company has brought in artists from all over the California region and beyond and commissioned them to paint murals on the walls. These murals often borrow the aesthetics of street art. Or, just as often, they take a given material — say, wooden slats, or slices of paper — and show how it can be turned into geometrical patterns. In both cases, art offers a lesson to the engineers working at their desks. It suggests that they too are busy turning life into patterns — in their case, digital patterns. And it suggests that by doing so, they are somehow speaking to the whole of their community, like a street artist would. This in turn encourages workers to be more creative, more committed to their art — the art of coding for Facebook. Art inside Facebook is a sort of visual technology that aims to reshape how engineers imagine and do their work.

What’s interesting is how different this is from the ways that pre-digital companies collected art. In the middle of the twentieth century, banks in New York built large collections of paintings and sculptures. They hung them on the walls and put them in lobbies as signs of good taste, as status markers. Later they could sell them at a profit. Or they could give them to the city in order to help create a public space. For the companies of twentieth-century Manhattan, art came in the form of art objects, could be bought and sold, and offered the company status in the meantime. In Silicon Valley, coders already have plenty of status. Art encourages them to work harder, longer, more creatively — and to imagine that, like the great artists of the past, they are changing the world.

In your book, you stress the contradiction, within Silicon Valley, between the ruthless pursuit of innovation and profit, and the pursuit of self-expression and self-individuality. Can you tell us more about this paradox?

It’s not a contradiction! At least not in Silicon Valley. Self-expression and individualism are the life blood of business here. On one hand, companies make their profits by soliciting, tracking, analyzing and reselling their user’s expressions. What are social media after all but mines, in which our desire to express ourselves creates the ore? At the same time, they work very hard to make sure that their elite employees — their computer scientists, their interface designers, their back-end programmers — bring every part of themselves to bear on the work at hand. By encouraging workers to express their individuality at and through work, they are able to help the workers think of themselves as members of a community. And if they do that, if they forget that they are employees, they may forget to work to contract, so to speak, and instead, overachieve in ways that help the company. They may even achieve things for the company while working in service of their own self-expression that none of their managers would even have thought to ask for.

What do the headquarters of Silicon Valley firms tell about their “philosophy” and the way they consider employees in the race for innovation and profit? What impacts does this possibly have on employees?

There are lots of different kinds of headquarters here. Some are small and bland and hyper-functional. They look more like warehouses than headquarters and that’s deliberate. They are meant to be easy to move in and out of. When start-ups come and go, the buildings can remain.

The big company headquarters — Apple, Google, Facebook — are statements designed and built by elite architects. Apple has created an enormous circular building. Like an elite social circle, it can be impossible to enter without the right connections, but once entered, it lets you see everything and roam everywhere. Facebook has rebuilt the old campus of Sun Microsystems, a campus that is really a self-contained city. Facebook’s core headquarters building has a wide-open floor plan. Mark Zuckerberg sits there inside a glass-walled office, seeing and being seen — at least when he’s in the office. Google is building a series of tent-like shapes, enormous variations of circus tents and especially, the tents of the Burning Man Festival. Underneath, their floor spaces will also be very open.

I think the combination of open floor plans and well-guarded, even subtly walled campuses makes a handy metaphor for how the companies work. They solicit our individual efforts, whether as employees or users, by inviting us into highly designed and carefully controlled environments. They extract our individual value. And at the same time, they encourage us to congratulate ourselves for having found our way into such cool, futuristic, high-tech places.

Why do employees of certain tech companies participate in art festivals like Burning Man? Is it a way to reproduce creativity and serendipity in another context?

I think of Burning Man as being to the tech industry what Catholic and Protestant churches were to the manufacturing industries of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the industrial era, you would work all week in the factory and go to church on Sunday. When you got there, the bosses would sit up front, the middle managers would sit right behind them, and the workers would sit in the back. Going to church was a way to rehearse the social order of the factory in a spiritual setting.

The same is true of Burning Man for the post-industrial workers of the tech industry. Inside their companies they work in flexible, collaborative teams, to build technological systems. At Burning Man, they build art — with lots of technology and in flexible, collaborative teams. They are in fact rehearsing the patterns of labor on which the tech industry depends. The language they speak in the desert belongs to a vaguely New Age spirituality and so it’s filled with the celebration of personal growth, of “creativity” and “serendipity”.

But make no mistake: the spiritual side of Burning Man, like the spiritual side of the nineteenth-century factory-town church, is a place for celebrating the principles on which a certain kind of manufacturing depends.