Simon Denny’s installations have multiple lives – as any board game does; it all started with Denny’s home country, New Zealand, where a few years ago the German-American entrepreneur and venture capitalist Peter Thiel bought up large parcels of commercial property and land, resulting in him being granted citizenship. Thiel and his actions indicated to Denny a new modus of colonial strategy, which led the artist to create a body of work in response, which focused on notions of labour, automation, and gamification.

Denny began to lay out the methodology of these libertarian, anarcho-capitalist players on board games, as they often spoke on forums about the latter as tools for entrepreneurship, likening games such as Catan to testbeds for learning how to create and conduct successful takeovers in the real world. He then decided to name the game ‘Founders’ in the vein of entrepreneurial speech, rather than ‘Settlers’, the game from which his game is forked.

Alongside the tabletop game, Denny allows viewers to walk as one with the structures, as if the viewers themselves had turned into the pawns. Exploring extractive behaviours through devices, the cut-out, drawing, and film cast the Caterpillar smartband as the protagonist of the untold story about digital technologies that mine, collect, and process human-body data. The device ensures that the worker’s fatigue does not jeopardise production, a.k.a. profit by fatigue – a double-edged sword of both care and economy.

Caterpillar Biometric worker fatigue monitoring smartband Extractor pop display, 2019
UV print on honeycomb cardboard, shrink-wrapped Extractor boardgames, 92 x 157 x 229 cm
Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York

Caterpillar Inc. Biometric worker fatigue monitoring smartband promotion screen video token, 2019
Aluminium, UV print on Plexiglas, fluorescent light tubes in original cardboard packaging, Aluvision trade fair booth component, 120 x 10 x 68 cm
Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York

Speculative accountability trial courtroom sketch: Brisbane supreme court, Caterpillar Biometric worker fatigue monitoring wristband, 2020
Watercolour on paper, 97 x 40 cm
Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York

Caterpillar Inc. Biometric worker fatigue monitoring smartband promotion screen video token, 2019
HD video, 1’10’’
Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York