Customer Care at Spazio Chirale

On 20 March, from 10 am to 6 pm, Spazio Chirale is live streaming with Customer Care, continuing an interest cultivated over the years “focusing on common, everyday actions as liturgies of contemporary man”. The performance, lasting eight hours, the average length of working day but also a period of time that allows the work to be enjoyed by audiences all around the world, takes artistic interaction to the extreme by reproducing the common experience of interacting with a virtual chatbot. This practice dehumanises both the user and worker, transferred to the relationship between audience and performer, producing an effect of immersion, estrangement and identification, and performing a professional practice characteristic of the globalised era in which we live.

Three performers at a time play the three musical lines – melodic, ground and timbric – forming the music. Equipped like switchboard operators, they wear “headsets” in a location with partitions inside a room with a display window.  The audience can interact from anywhere in the world via the chatbot active on the landing page which, among the options, allows users to change the three musical lines, chat with an operator or, finally, put their name forward to play music with them.

In addition to the 12 musicians involved in the performance, who are physically present at Spazio Chirale in Rome, anyone who wishes can apply to play in “smartworking” or rather “homeworking” mode, by sending a request during the 8-hour “working day” using the chatbot.

The on-site performers and the chosen “candidates” will take turns every twenty minutes to play three at a time, each musician performing one of the three musical lines and tasked to respect, as far as possible, the instructions they receive from the public via the chatbot, according to a principle of “performative constraints” inspired by employees’ work duties. This now information in order to attend and more soon after the performance is over.