Creative Bodies at Work: The Labor and Love of Voice Actors

• In Event: Labor and Workplace Control

Abstract

The rise of digital replicas – algorithmically-generated entities that mirror the voices of human workers – poses new questions for labor sociology. While scholarship has investigated how capital utilizes the creativity of workers’ “minds” to ensure effort and maintain the legitimacy of capitalist exploitation, what remains unexplored are the ways in which capital controls the creativity and autonomy of workers’ “bodies”. To what extent is technology utilized in this process?

Building from Autonomist Marxist theory, this project examines the labor process of voice actors to interrogate the relationship between technology, creativity, and workers’ bodies. Voice actors pose a fitting case for this question: their careers (like many creative workers) are precarious as workers hop between projects; technology is a necessary component of their work; their labor stems directly from their bodies; and technology threatens their careers, as shown by last year’s SAG-AFTRA Interactive Media Strike. This study utilizes in-depth interviews and auto-ethnography to learn what meaning workers ascribe to their craft via the use of their bodies, and the ways they defend such processes against the control of capital.

Preliminary findings suggest voice actors treat their bodies as bulwarks against technologies seeking to replace their labor. Through this body as bulwark logic, artificial intelligence may make production more efficient but cannot work creatively like workers can because their bodies are infused with personal experiences shaping their labor. The emergence of this logic changes workers’ labor processes. Workers react to the rise of technologies by publicly defending their bodily creativity as necessary to their work. Actors change their performances to avoid sounding like replicas and strengthen their skills at audio editing and marketing to increase autonomy over their creativity. Voice actors begin to see their labor as a craft rather than a precarious job to protect their ability to use their bodies creatively.

Author

• Justin Matthew Germain, University of California-Berkeley