Cold Call: Time Theft as Avoided Emissions  is an unconventional carbon offsetting scheme that draws on strategies of worker sabotage and applies them in the context of high emission companies in the fossil fuel industry. Time theft is a strategy to deliberately slow productivity, where workers waste time and are therefore paid for periods of idleness. For example, fake sick days, sleeping on the job, extended lunch breaks, or engaging in non-work-related activities like social media or unrelated phone calls. In extractive industries where productivity remains firmly tethered to carbon emissions, sabotage is an effective strategy for emissions reductions.   

Cold Call  is an installation that takes the form of a call center. Audiences are connected by telephone to executives in the fossil fuel industry and instructed to keep them on the phone as long as possible. The cumulative time stolen from these executives is then quantified as carbon credits, using an innovative new offsetting methodology. The project is powered by custom call center software that allows participants to make calls, learn about who they are calling, access call scripts and conversation ideas, and listen to recordings of calls that have already been made. A leader board tracks the total number and length of calls. To date, the longest call has stretched for over 39 minutes.

Links: https://lav.io/projects/cold-call/

Artists: Sam Lavigne and Tega Brain 

With support from STRP Festival and Creative Capital

Sam Lavigne (US)  is an artist and educator whose work deals with data, surveillance, cops, natural language processing, and automation. He is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of Design at UT Austin. He was formerly Special Projects editor at the  New Inquiry  magazine and he creates and contributes to open-source software projects for the arts.

Tega Brain (AU)  is an Australian-born artist and environmental engineer whose work examines issues of ecology, data systems, and infrastructure. She has created wireless networks that are controlled by natural phenomena, systems for obfuscating personal data, and a smell-based dating service. She is Assistant Professor of Integrated Digital Media at New York University and her first book,  Code as Creative  Medium, is co-authored with Golan Levin and published by MIT Press.

The word saboteur comes from the French word “saboter“, which in the early 20th century meant to kick someone with an old-fashioned wooden shoe. Through the architecture of a call center, artists Tega Brain and Sam Lavigne make a cheeky request to disrupt business as usual and engage in time theft, a strategy for slowing worker efficiency. They encourage exhibition visitors of their speculative call center to telephone corporate executives whose companies have ties to the fossil fuel industry and keep them on the line as long as possible. For the artists, the time stolen from these oil and gas executives has carbon benefits and is quantifiable as credits using a carbon offsetting methodology. Using the highest carbon emitting company in the United States, Vistra Energy, as a case study, the artists test a formula that reveals when the more senior oil and gas employees are distracted from working, carbon emissions have the potential to slow. Living in global climate emergency, Tega Brian and Sam Lavigne have put on their metaphorical wooden shoes and have landed a kick.