Automated Refusal
by Salvatore Vitale
This project can be seen this year at Fotografia Europea, which takes place from April 30 to June 14 in Reggio Emilia, Italy.
The full program is available here.
Automated Refusal is part of Death by GPS, a long-term project where Salvatore Vitale examines how automation technologies are reshaping labour and revealing the contradictions of digital capitalism.
In Automated Refusal, Vitale explores the precarious realities of gig work, where platform ranking, constant surveillance, and shrinking leisure blur the boundaries between life and labour. The film questions how technology reshapes the relationship between humans and their environments in the digital age.
The work examines how automation continues to transform life, work, and society. It delves deeper into how individuals navigate the challenges of digital labour. The video installation foregrounds the nuanced struggles, aspirations, and often-overlooked failures in the pursuit of autonomy and resistance against exploitation and marginalisation.
Blending real observation with fictional narrative, Automated Refusal challenges the assumption that technology follows a fixed or neutral path. Through non-linearity and interruption, the film mirrors the fragmented and unstable nature of digital labour.
The work follows four self-employed freelancers navigating the marginalised tech economy. Their stories run in parallel, each offering a distinct perspective on personal strategies of refusal within precarious working conditions. A constant tension underpins the narrative, one that never culminates in open rebellion. Instead, resistance emerges through small, silent gestures: micro acts of defiance that, while unable to spark systemic change, embody persistence and agency. These moments of alienation, solitude, and frustration echo the broader condition of labour as it is structured, exploited, and commodified in the digital era.
Fragmentation shapes both the structure and language of the film. Parallel stories unfold through speculative “what if” scenarios, layering multiple realities and perspectives to expose contradictions in digital work. These narratives, based on interviews and situational testimonies with freelancers and field research conducted in recent years, are reinterpreted to form a fictional narrative grounded in realism.
Automated Refusal illuminates the tensions between automation, exploitation, and the enduring quest for autonomy in contemporary labour, insisting that human presence remains central to technological systems.