Artist: Tega Brain and Sam Lavigne

Genre: Interactive Installation

Cold Call is an unconventional carbon offsetting scheme that draws on strategies of worker sabotage and applies them in the context of high emission companies of the fossil fuel industry. A novel carbon offset methodology called “Time Theft as Avoided Emissions” has been developed specifically for the project. Time theft is where workers are paid for time when they are idle. 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 this installation, we purchased the phone numbers of 1000 executives who work in high emitting industries like mining and oil extraction. Audiences are invited to work in a call center and call the executives in an attempt to steal as much time from them as possible in order to generate carbon credits. Artist bio: Tega Brain and Sam Lavigne’s work examine the shifts in behaviors, desires, language and economics catalyzed by computational systems and the internet. In their collaborations they have simulated international organizations, run a real dating service in NYC, and shared the entire Enron email archive with online audiences. Their work has been widely discussed in the media, in outlets such as The New Yorker, Marie Claire, The Ellen Show, Art in America, The World Almanac, Slovenian Public Radio and India Today, and they recently opened a two-person show How to Get to Zero, at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, New York.