Office Archipelago

red screen

Boredom. Eight and a half hours each day, forty two and a half hours each week. Over one hundred and seventy hours per month. God knows how many hours year after year I have sat on the same brown checked office chair with its incomprehensible collection of levers that, however you adjust them, never make it comfortable. Confined to the same two metre squared corner of a dull office with white walls, a grey short pile carpet with, by now, its own scuff marks pointing to the correct placement of the chair wheels. Open plan. Light blue, grey, and yellowed veneer. Each desk separated from the next by a pale blue screen, clusters of three desks form islands within the larger office archipelago. Eyes becoming sticky, have you ever noticed that you don’t blink as often when looking into a computer monitor? Carpal Tunnels resting on the grain of the yellowed veneer. A windup toy car, the best present from last year’s Christmas party cracker and a children’s felt tip drawing attempt to add some personality to this lifeless environment. This is an open plan office but any chance of relieving the boredom by chatting to workmates is quashed by the foul atmosphere created by the overbearing, micromanaging supervisor who patrols the office like a prison screw. We have been unionising, there’s talk of a collective grievance, but this all has to be kept quiet for now. No one has the confidence to be open yet and it looks like the union official could sell us out. They want individual cases rather than a collective approach. In the current climate of precarious work, no one in this office has the confidence to take an individual grievance.

Published by

John Wild

John Wild is a London based artist who works across performance, sound, text, code, electronics and machine learning to carry out speculative research into the utopian and dystopian futures imminent within digital technology.

Leave a Reply