[porkmarras]

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3.1 Title: The Horizon of Control: a visual response to homogeneity and repetition in office culture.

3.2 WHAT? Brief Description:
The primary aim of this study is to produce a series of digital prints and sculptures that explore some of the (de)human(ising) ramifications of homogeneity, repetition, and control/powerlessness within office environments. Specifically, the work will seek to uncover and visually represent the tensions that arise from the subtle ways in which office environments and office objects are simultaneously ‘mapped’ by two psychologically opposed actor groups.

On the one hand, the company/corporate aesthetic and ethos – in the form of top-end management, accountants and shareholders - seek a minimalist, sanitised, de-personalised, highly functional and essentially machine-like space, allowing maximum control and economic productiveness, emptied of any ‘distraction’. On the other hand, there are numerous intimate modes of resistance to this control - and to the corporate blandness and cog-like existences it enforces – that are engaged in by the individuals who work – and therefore, in visceral terms, live - in the space, through the territorializing, re-narratising and ‘reclamation’ of the environment in which they spend their days.

The issue is one of abstract versus existential ownership, of the virtual versus the actual.

A company owns the space legally, dictates its uses and profits from these uses. The employees ‘own’ the space in a more personal, direct way as their daily habitat, over which they must naturally feel some degree of claim and power in order to feel psychologically and emotionally comfortable. At its extreme the company commodifies the space mathematically, as an expenditure on so many square feet of floor space, so many items of office equipment and stationary, and so much paid per ‘man-hour’ to the workers. All of this measured against ‘units’ shifted. For their part the employees as living human beings resist this – must inevitably resist this - definition of the meaning of those very stressful, human hours of labour they contribute, very often for a renumeration felt at heart or even quite consciously to be more or less derisory.

However, this resistance has a horizon inasmuch as the employees cannot – however much they may subconsciously or secretly want to – destroy the space that occupies them. This horizon is the horizon of powerlessness and entrapment. They need their jobs and salaries. There are therefore two primary responses to this powerlessness, and to the amalgamation of public humiliation and private degradation that it eventually breeds. There is either an inner assimilation of the corporate aesthetic as a feeling of estrangement, detachment and emotional automation, or there is – in effect – rebellion, albeit of necessity a cautious and covert rebellion, in which company resources and materials are appropriated and subverted to the unrecognised and unserved needs of the worker. Autonomy asserts itself against automation.

Through an analysis of conflict between the formal/utilitarian and the private/fetishistic properties of office objects and images, and of the multiple narratives that surround and are created by the people within the office environment, the prints and sculptures will show this subtle re-mapping, this sly re-narratising at work. Likewise they will attempt to communicate the reverse, the inner assimilation of the automated office aesthetic.
In terms of artistic practice they will set out to determine which artistic techniques can best convey in static form the emotional resonances of what is a temporal experience – repetition and drudgery. By cloning, enhancing and re-distributing the objects, materials and aesthetics ‘of’ and ‘in’ the workplace, the digital and sculptural format will be used to tease out the banal, the humane and trivial consequences of the conflict between these mutually exclusive yet mutually dependent mappings of the space.

This will include:
(i) A series of digital/sculptural reconstructions where the concept of implicit homogeneity in the office environment is recognized and made increasingly more explicit – in some ways to the point of caricature
(ii) A body of digital/sculptural work that investigates the suitability of using certain images, materials, objects and processes from the work environment to portray a feeling of repeated action.
(iii) An examining of how the disciplines of sculpture and digital media may overlap and become integrated
through the working process.

A supporting exegesis and a final exhibition will conclude the program.










3.3 WHY? Rationale for program:

Technological advancements - within the call-centre environment in particular - have often restricted mobility to the point of claustrophobia and augmented social alienation within already dehumanising workplaces. The physical effects of repetitive work have been well documented throughout the past ten years and the research conducted on repetitive strain injury, along with other muscular disorders, has questioned the long-standing sustainability of work speeds, which are largely governed by technology.

There is an irony in the fact that those who facilitate the movement and selling of consumer goods are themselves being utterly consumed. Consumers regularly complain about the robotic, faceless, unassailable power of bureaucrats and ‘people at the other end of the phone’ of large companies. Yet this voice of power on the behalf of power is voiced by the one of the most demoralised and powerless of worker-types. The psychological ramifications of automated, cell-like, endlessly repetitive working days are less commonly discussed than the technological advancements that ‘increase profits’, and with this in mind I want to examine how people communicate with or subvert each other via the things around them by appropriating, adapting, and narratizing the objects, materials, and appliances that threaten to subjugate them. By monitoring the mass-manufactured office objects of cold functionality in the idiosyncratic context of possible intimate, human meanings projected! onto them, the project will illustrate the states of emotional truancy we are susceptible to in the office environment and how our interaction with the objects of daily life can affect our ability to work or even communicate effectively.

With the project pivoting between these concerns, the following questions will drive the analysis:

(i) What signification does profit/exploitation play in determining our relationship(s) with objects in the workplace?
(ii) How do invidiuals resist corporate philosophy in practise by their interactions with the objects around them?
(iii) In what ways are personal, public and ‘corporate’ spaces contested and negotiated through our appropriations of the objects of mass manufacture?
(iv) How does this all ultimately impinge on our communication, contact and movement within the workplace?
(v) How can the psychological/sociological influences of homogeneity within corporate culture become interpreted through the materials and processes associated with the objects of the office?


The issue of repetition presents a curious dynamic to work with in the ‘office’ context. As a consumer item, the office appliance or object is a reproduction by virtue of its repeated production. As a consumed /utilised item, such an object may have a unique existence, but can it come to represent, for its human possessor(s), repeated action. This presents an interesting technical problem from the point of view of sculpture and digital media. How does one communicate a feel for not only spatial, but, simultaneously – in terms of human interaction with the objects of daily life - temporal repetition? How does one portray in plastic form the repetitive and hollow quality of corporate existence, its philosophy and its practise in the workplace?

By encouraging debate as to how office space and utiliarian objects – and the power/control dynamics they generate - are negotiated and aestheticised, the broader sociological decoding of this research is expected to be as pertinent to the employee of the office as it is to the employer. The exploration of multiple mappings of space, and of modes of expressing time-based experience through plastic representation, will hopefully be of interest and benefit to the art community at large.