This December, FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology), Liverpool, is collaborating with the Royal College of Art’s Creative Exchange (CX) Hub to present the exhibition Time & Motion: Redefining Working Life which has resulted from a major research and innovation programme. Artists include Cohen van Balen, Harun Farocki, Oliver Walker, Blake Fall-Conroy, Sam Meech, Molleindustria, Jeff Crouse and Stephanie Rothernberg, Andrew Norman Wilson and The Creative Exchange.

A Time & Motion Study is a scientific method – developed by Frederick Taylor and later by Frank and Lillian Gilbreth – used to analyse work procedures and determine the most efficient method of operation. This approach has been used extensively in workplaces including factories, hospitals, retail, and banks since the industrial age.

Using this as a starting point, the exhibition Time & Motion will use artworks, research projects, archival materials and interventions to track our journey through the world of work, from clocking on at the factory gates to checking in online from our home office or local entrepreneurial networking space. As our industrial economy has given way to a service and knowledge economy, producing ideas and experiences rather than artefacts, how have our patterns of day-to-day working life changed?

A new online game What’s Your Number (tm-888.co.uk) commissioned by FACT and developed by the Royal College of Art invites people from all over the world to test their own understanding of their working life and the traditional notion of eight hours work, eight hours rest and eight hours play. Users will be encouraged to think about their working life in a new way as they answer a series of questions to reveal their own three-digit number. How many will be the traditional eight, eight, eight?

Time & Motion will work with a range of artists, creative producers and researchers to experiment across venue, audience, workspace and digital space, transforming FACT into a hybrid between factory and exploratorium.

The exhibition asks timely questions including ‘What happened to the eight hour day?’ ‘What is your work life balance?’ and ‘How has technology affected the way that you work?’ each encouraging the visitor to consider their own working life and the changes happening around them.

Highlights include:

Cohen van Balen explores the nature of mass-manufacturing through new video commission 75 Watt. For this work, a product with no useful purpose was designed specifically to be made in China, its function only to choreograph a dance performed by the labourers manufacturing it.

Minimum Wage Machine by Blake Fall-Conroy allows anybody to work for minimum wage by fulfilling a simple, manual task. Turning the crank will yield one penny every 0.17 seconds, or £6.31 an hour (UK minimum wage), sparking discussion about the value of labour, the nature of minimum wage and capitalism as a whole.

Laborers of Love by Jeff Crouse and Stephanie Rothernberg explores how online culture has transformed how we think of pornography in terms of production and consumption. Visitors are invited to create and commission their sexual fantasy using mturk.com, an internet application that hires anonymous online workers to complete micro tasks that still require human intelligence.

Time & Motion: Redefining Working Life runs at Fact from 12th December 2013 to the 9th March 2014.