Raqs Media Collective

Unknown Codes from the Future at Work: The Robot Redux

The Twilight Language of Labor: Listening to Robots, Animals, and Ourselves

Raqs Media Collective’s longstanding interest in the conditions of laboring have led them to listen carefully and attentively to the speech and silence surrounding work. In this presentation, they think in »twilight language« – learning from Kabir, a weaver-poet in fifteenth century Benaras who famously spoke his poems in a fabulist vocabulary. They also read between the lines of a worker’s newspaper in contemporary Faridabad, a major industrial suburb of Delhi. Diary entries, animal stories and speculations on the temporal dimensions of laboring enter the mix. In doing all this, Raqs Media Collective ask what it means to try and grasp the paradox of the fulfillment and exhaustion that layer the experience of laboring.

The Raqs Media Collective was founded in 1992 by Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, and Shuddhabrata Sengupta.