dear oh dear #3 is part of an installation called Personalia, where one is made to feel the presence of another person upon entering the exhibition space. The artist collective Tromarama similarly wishes to recreate the feeling of being watched and observed, with the exception that the surveillant is digital media and not a person.

This work is a screen print of attendance records covered with foils of images of colourful and shimmering orchids. In metropolitan Indonesian cities, there is a custom for big corporations to keep a display of orchids in their offices. These orchids are kept in vases as long as they are in bloom and once they perish, they are discarded. By using the icon of the orchids on labour measuring documents, the piece represents how our value is extracted solely from our ability to be online as our attention is transformed to capital for the benefit of big data companies. Given how large amounts of labour work have become digital-based or dependent, our screen time has become commodified.  Once we go offline, we are no longer of utility and like the orchids, we can be dismissed and easily replaced. Moreover, the idea of clocking in and out of work is a common norm in corporate offices, desensitising the layman to the dehumanisation of labour— shown through the grid structures of the attendance sheet in the artwork.

The work is a testament to the collapse of structures in a post-internet economy, of work and leisure and of real and virtual. While engaging with social media appears to be a choice made in our “non-work time”, these digital platforms are actually an instrument of control guiding our preferences and consumption patterns. This is treated as a resource and is symbolic of the rise of datafication. It is the technological trend drawing on dataism, where one collects big data and sells it as something holding value—hence human behaviour is commodified. In late modernity, increased digitalisation is shaping the relations between humans, nation-states are declining and the growth of netizens is becoming more and more powerful and performative.