A week or so ago, tech blog Gizmodo put up a post on a Chicago-based artist, Andrew Norman Wilson, who had done a video project on one of the most secure locations on earth, outside of Osama bin Laden's compound: the Googleplex.

Wilson, who was working as a contract worker on the 'plex in 2007, noticed that employees of a nearby building had a color badge he had never seen before. He was familiar with the other badge colors: white, meaning full-time Googler; green, meaning intern; and red, meaning contractor — but these employees wore yellow badges. And unlike the other colored badges, these workers were denied the famed employer's benefits —such as access to Google bikes, free meals at the cafeteria and free rides on the Google buses — that make Google consistently ranked one of the best companies in the world to work for. Wilson believes that these workers were part of a team called ScanOps, who were manually scanning pages into the database of Google Books. (The Bay Citizen asked Google for a comment; we'll update if they get back to us.)

We caught up with Wilson, who decided to make his observations on this mysterious class of workers the basis for a video art project, over the phone. First, here's the video piece explaining his experience at Google:

Wilson, who graduated from Sycrause with a degree in journalism, moved to San Francisco in 2007. He began collaborating with Artists Television Access on Valencia Street on experimental video pieces, and took a job with Transvideo, a company that produced much of Google's in-house video (including author talks.)

At Google, Wilson said, he became aware of the badge-class-system during orientation but it took a while before he noticed the yellow badges next door. "It was not really something that expressed in a formalized way," he said. 

He was immediately struck by the labor issues at play: how and why did Google decide not to give this class of digital worker the same privileges as others? At the same time, as an artist and someone working for Google, Wilson was aware of the larger point, namely that not being able to ride Google bikes or eat free Google lunches does not exactly make Google the equivalent of sweat shop managers.

"In activism in my art, I try to be real about my agency," he said, "In this particular situation, I didn't see that I had much agency to make a difference. And my intention was not to produce an expose."

So, as Wilson details in the video, he sets upon trying to approach and talk to the workers, and this action causes him to be fired within one day of Google security seeing him talk to the yellow-badgers with a camera. After his quick dismissal, Wilson was circumspect about the tape he had. On the advice of friends, he just sat on it, not wanting to invite legal action from the behemoth corporation.

This year, though, he decided to put out there as part of an art installation in Chicago. First, he put it up on Vimeo six months ago as a password-protected clip, then he opened up it. Since Gizmodo picked it up, he said that he has gotten emails from many former and current tech workers. 

And Wilson has been happy with the response, as his intention was not to demonize Google as much as illuminate a new perspective on labor. The title of the piece, "Workers Leaving the Googleplex," is meant to invoke the Lumiere Brothers famous early masterpiece, "Workers Leaving the Factory."

"Digitizing is a more mechanized form of labor, something that we think is in the past or happens in Asia," he said, "What I hope this video does is show how this type of exclusion or marginalization can feel."