Making a relic of the eight-hour day Time & Motion, Redefining Working Life FACT gallery, Liverpool, until March 9, 2014 What is work? Scrolling through apps endlessly on your tablet, according to one exhibit in a show at Liverpool's FACT cultural centre. The "iPaw," by artists Aristarkh Chernyshev and Alexei Shulgin, has a mechanical dog doing just that, suggesting digital media have planted in us an insatiable desire that leaves us slavering for treats like hounds. Other works at the Time & Motion exhibition include a computer game in which mice compete for cheese to have the right to sit behind a big desk. It was developed by Italy's Molleindustria, which makes games that challenge the player's conscience. Elsewhere, a zoetrope features figures on a nonstop cycle of bed, car and crawling back to bed again. The aim is to examine how the rhythm of our working lives has changed since the eight-hour day was first introduced in Australia in 1856. The original notion put forward in 1817 by Robert Owen, the industrialist and utopian, that "eight hours labour, eight hours recreation and eight hours rest" was the right balance for any human, seems long gone, if it ever did exist. "The contemporary information worker lab­ours within a "factory" whose gates never close and with work continuously, tantalisingly close to hand," write FACT's Emily Gee and Jeremy Myerson of the Royal College of Art in a book accompanying the show. Visitors are invited to clock in when they arrive with an old-fashioned punchcard and then clock off. How long would it take to see the entire exhibition? Around four hours, according to artistic director Mike Stubbs. That is half your day's leisure - a big commitment. I whisk round in one, wondering whether this was work or recreation. Films dominate. 75 Watts is a video of a cho­reo­graphed dance by Chinese workers on a production line. The production line is genuine; the product is not. A multisided box with perforations and switches, it exists solely to create the dance. The artists behind the film ask whether the workers shape the object or the object shapes the workers. On another wall are videos of six people each earning £1. A western businessman disappears in just over a second. A cotton picker in Turkey is there for more than an hour. Oliver Walker's installation One Pound works conceptually, but the viewer is left staring at four blank screens for much of the time. Will anyone have the sense of solidarity to linger? Upstairs, the film Workers leaving the Googleplex apes the Lumière Brothers. Andrew Norman Wilson's video shows contractors who do not enjoy all the privileges of staffers, working at the "ScanOps" site scanning book pages for Google Books. His 11-minute monotone narration explains how he lost his contractor's job after making it. You can watch for free on YouTube - another reflection of how the value of work has been eroded. As Stubbs says, the job of the artist is to ask questions. But answers to the work-life conundrum are more difficult.