How does contemporary art support the labour struggle against AI and automation? Huckfield’s question is rhetorical, surely. Her manual weaving loom, refashioned into an electronic musical instrument, adorned with Luddite hammers, offers zero insight. The verbiage in the handout – more laboured, sadly, than the artefacts – tries to intersectionalise the Industrial Revolution, proposing that Ned Ludd’s campaign against the Spinning Jenny might have been more successful had both of them come out as non-binary. 

The whole thing’s a category error; art’s gender and class projections occlude matters more tightly than the cloud. Huckfield crowbars made-up heroes into past revolutions to pose as the saviour in the next one. Yet she still needed the help of eight ‘workers’ to mount her installation, not counting, that is, the machines in China which likely fabricated its substance.