Artwork: Cold Call

Artists: Sam Lavigne and Tega Brain

Response by: Paul O’Neill, Huston School of Film & Digital Media, University of Galway

Tega Brain and Sam Lavigne follow in a long line of artists who manipulate and subvert the technological and communication systems and infrastructures of capitalist society. From the détournments of the Situationist International, the computational hacks of the Electronic Disturbance Theatre or the culture jamming techniques of the Yes Men, such practices often employ absurdist and theatrical methods to draw attention to a specific issue or cause.  

Cold Call: Time Theft as Avoided Emission addresses the most defining issue of our time – the climate catastrophe. More specifically, it confronts, indeed calls out, one of the principal contributors to this catastrophe, the fossil fuel industry. Influenced by workers’ rights movements and strategies for (im!)mobilisation, the piece engages with time as a tactic. In doing so, it can be situated within related practices such as the slow computing, food and travel movements that seek to counterbalance the harm brought about by the relentless global cycle of extraction and consumption. 

The ultimate power in this work resides with us, the audience. For without us, there will be no change. By occupying a call centre – a symbol of predatory capitalism – and subverting the communications infrastructure available to us, we challenge the hierarchical status quo of the fossil fuel industry while offsetting, if only temporarily and symbolically, the damage it causes. 

Cold Call: Time Theft as Avoided Emission reminds us that both individual and collective direct action are needed to save our planet, and to hold accountable those who knowingly contribute to its destruction in the relentless pursuit of profit.  

Link to view more information on the artwork: https://2024.betafestival.ie/exhibitions/unsettling-the-algorithm/Cold%20Call