Work Party

Work Party is a series of experimental, high-speed gatherings between gig workers and app users in Bangalore, where the artist Tara Kelton uses the delivery apps’ own mechanics to produce a party. Workers finally cross the doors’ thresholds to break bread with the app users at the table.

The food, party materials, and guests all arrive by ordering on the platform: A Blinkit worker delivers a folding chair for the next worker to sit in, a Swiggy worker brings tea, and everyone shares it.

Convening the people the platform keeps apart is an act of refusal of its logic – and the worker is never made late; the gathering must fit inside platform time. This presents a design challenge that Kelton will use the residency to solve: how to build a party around the driver’s workflow, from their vehicle to gate to doorstep, inside the user’s home, and back.

The app’s »note to driver« field is one of the few places the platform’s code allows human interaction with the worker: this transactional instruction is overwritten with an invitation to gather.

Speed is no longer only the gig worker’s condition; everything now moves faster than human capacity. These gatherings will research the question »can meaningful exchange happen at high speed?«

The project will be published as a manual with instructions for organizing a Work Party using any gig-work app, anywhere: how to co-opt any platform to turn it into a party, and how to host an exchange within the structure and speed each platform permits. Alongside this, documentation of the research and activities Kelton carries out with the workers’ photos, videos, and texts (respecting the workers’ privacy).