Virtual Assistance
Andrew Norman Wilson and Akhil C.
2009-ongoing
The Virtual Assistance project began with research geared towards unpacking the relational system of Get Friday, a virtual personal assistant service based in Bangalore, India. Get Friday typically provides remote executive support, where a largely American client base is assigned a “virtual” personal assistant. I am a part of that client base, paying monthly fees for a primary assistant who works out of the Get Friday office in India. My “assistant” is a 25-year-old male Bangalore resident named Akhil. In paying for our relationship I am not trying to outsource work, but rather to attempt collaborative projects and even reversals of the normative outsourcing flow under a corporate contract arranged for one-way command. Using the service has been a method of engaging with, understanding, and reacting to an economy in order to learn, with the help of Akhil, how to peel back the corporate veneer, revealing limitations, histories, networks, power, and desire by making toy boats, construction manuals, a video about the best fighter jet in the world, PowerPoint performances, pulse rate tests, Excel graphs, office installations, g-chats, international mailings, and more.
For an in depth discussion of the project, read “Virtual Assistance: An Interview with Andrew Norman Wilson” in Media Fields Journal. Also, on the Get Friday Blog – Pushing the Frontiers of Exploration by Get Friday CEO Sunder P and my follow-up post on the project.
