Architectural design, practice and communications cannot be imagined today without the use of the architectural rendering — an image or a moving-image artifact in which a proposed design, or an alternative world, seems alive as an already “built” reality. While purely virtual, this widely circulated mediatic object made in computers through human inputs, is both hyperreal and illusory. These images crucially visualize and shape architectures of world-building, design and image production processes, while constantly separating the art, skills, and techniques from the labor of image-making that weave computers, data, and human interactions around the world. These seemingly discrete entities embed collective processes, increasingly demanding and extracting resources. Their production processes, often outsourced and automated to image factories — specialized rendering firms in low-wage countries — and now to generative AI, remain largely hidden in computer black boxes or darkened offices. It is in these inaccessible spaces where labor intensive micro-work and extractive machine learning turn an architectural wireframe into a rendered image. 

At the cusp of ongoing transformations in computerization, automation, optimization, and A(G)I, Render Labor explores the modes and spaces of synthetic image production. Focusing on the work of rendering, the exhibition exposes the processes of visualization from design to production, consumption and dissemination. Highlighting the rifts in between and alongside these processes, it draws attention to resource and energy extraction, labor and mental exploitation, the problematics and possibilities embedded in rendering practices. In four sections: Synthetic Image, Workflows, Infrastructures and Interactions, it revisits design, technical, spatial and labor forces underlying synthetic imaging. The exhibition unfolds how and what human and (im)material resources are, either integral or generative, are invisibilized, exploited and expropriated. Framed as complete pictures, renderings provide a provisional view into a potential environment, though full of real-life elements, and in which the distinctions between the real and the virtual are designed to disappear. Render Labor focuses on what is outside this enclosed frame, on the other side of the resolute picture, or in between the flicker of the screen-based moving image, where collective authors, producers, economies and infrastructures remain visible.

CREDITS

RESEARCH PROJECT
Kadambari Baxi
CURATOR
Tania Tovar Torres
Juan Carlos Espinosa Cuock

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​CURATORIAL TEAM

Fernando Álvarez Camacho, Elena González Aguado,
Mayela Pérez Dimas, Hermes Ríos Posada y Valeria
Servin Galindo

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RESEARCH ASSISTANT
Jess Kuntz

MEDIA PERFORMANCE
Guy de Lancey y NiNi Dongnier

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EXHIBITION PRODUCTION
Fernando Álvarez Camacho, Elena González Aguado,
Laura Méndez Pacheco, Mayela Pérez Dimas, Hermes
Ríos Posada y Casandra Tapia Martinez

GRAPHIC DESIGN
Estudio P

MORE INFORMATION

GRAPHIC IDENTITY | Estudio P
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