THE ART OF SUPPLY CHAIN

New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) exhibits a supply chain themed exhibit of a modern gadget – the virtual assistant. Located on MOMA’s second floor, the exhibition features a centrepiece that digs deep into the entrails of Amazon’s Echo speaker. A black wallpaper displays a detailed description of the life cycle of an Amazon.com Inc. voice-activated Echo speaker. The art work depicts how the device is built, how it operates to what happens when it is thrown out. According to the gallery label, the piece analyzes the vast networks that encompass the “birth, life, and death” of a single Amazon Echo smart speaker.

“Systems Around the Work”

MoMA curators thought the piece by Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler would grab visitors, so they built a larger exhibit called Systems Around the Work, essentially treating the deep operations behind supply chains as art.

The show’s star attraction is ‘Anatomy of an AI System’, a data visualization by Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler. A series of prints exploring the future of energy extraction to a documentary showing factory workers on a choreographed assembly line in China, the exhibit spotlights the work behind the scenes that produces consumer goods, clothing, power and other mainstays of modern daily life.

The art pieces tell the viewer that there is plenty to learn about the art of supply chain and it’s a blend of natural resources and labour. The centrepiece “Anatomy of an AI System” came out of a desire to better understand
the real-world impacts of a rise in the use of artificial intelligence. “What we wanted to do was to make the
invisible visible, to look at the supply chain as a key part of how AI works”, said Dr. Crawford.

A supply chain is an entire system of producing and delivering a product or service, from the very beginning stage of sourcing the raw materials to the final delivery of the product or service to end-users. The supply chain lays out all aspects of the production process, including the activities involved at each stage, information that is being communicated, natural resources that are transformed into useful materials, human resources, and other components that go into the finished product or service.

According to senior curator Paola Antonelli, “The idea was to use that piece as an anchor and then talk about the three systems that it represents, systems of extraction of data, of labour and of resources. Systems are what drive our life in the world very often and they need to be recognized.

The Supply Chain Behind Amazon Echo

According to Crawford and Joler’s research, it takes over 110 elements to produce an Amazon Echo device. Those
elements will need to be transformed and combined into components, which then need to be assembled. The diagram points to the scale of the operation and emphasizes the art of supply chain management.

Materials need to be transported from mines to smelters and refiners, and onward to component manufacturers and
device assemblers. From there, goods enter distribution chains. But the story doesn’t end when gadgets arrive in
customers’ homes. The AI technology enabling voice assistants to respond to smart speaker operators needs creating and maintaining too. And this infrastructure spans from home Wi-Fi routers through internet server provider (ISP) equipment to data centers hosting the speech recognition magic, which puts thousands of GPUs and processors to work answering user questions.

This shines a light on the labour and planning that goes into making an item. It displays the complexities between innovation, the use of a product in the real world and the world of supply chain management.

Artistic Presentation of Supply Chain in The Past

Artists have long been inspired by supply chains workings. Photographers, filmmakers and artists have been
showcasing supply chain through their mediums. Dave Clark, co-chief executive of digital-focused freight forwarder Flexport Inc., says “Art is very heavily mathematically – based, it is this mix of left and right brain. The best artists are all geometry and symmetrical work coupled with creativity, and that’s what supply chain is. Supply chain is this mix of left brain, right brain, heavy analytics with a lot of gut instinct and people skills and leadership.”

The photographs taken by Frank Gilbreth in the 1910s displaying the movements of factory workers, director Mauro Herce‘s austere 2015 documentary “Dead Slow Ahead” about a freighter crossing the ocean, exhibits at National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., has exhibits on display on how railroads, highways and ports shaped the United States and on the global infrastructure required to operate cell phones all showcase supply chain workings.

The Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., has exhibits on display on how railroads highways and ports shaped the United States and on the global infrastructure required to operate cell phones. A recent exhibition at Museum Tinguely in Basel, Switzerland, looked at the waste and environmental impact of consumerism and industrialization. In 2016, a British filmmaker became an artist in residence on a container ship, and then got stuck onboard for weeks.