War Office

My parents’ long careers as civil servants within the Ministry of Defence and the writing of Guy Debord inspired this work, which explores the isolating nature of technology and its role in separating the worker from their function and the outcome.

Both my parents are civil servants within the Ministry of Defence and have been for decades. When speaking to them about their work they often spoke of pushing paper, making paper mountains, and wishing they had instead learnt a craft that gave them a physical product they could see after a day’s labour.

Within his work ‘The Society of the Spectacle’ the Marxist theorist and philosopher Guy Debord reflects on the idea that the worker being separated from the outcome can often eliminate their sense of what their function might be, and what it is they’re ultimately working towards. Debord theorised that although detached from what we produce, we do in fact construct much of the world that surrounds us, yet in doing so we increasingly separate ourselves from this world, isolated by the very technology we work to create.

The notion of the performance in relation to the spectacle is fundamental to Debord’s philosophies. To illustrate this, I repetitively performed with various forms of office equipment, isolated within the white cube. Each time abstracting myself and the objects, presenting obscure reimagining’s of their functions, humanising the technology and evoking a theatre of psychology.

Whilst gathering archival material from my parents’ corporate yearbooks, it became apparent that arrows, labelling and numbering were inherent throughout the aesthetics. I altered these images, erasing their captions, my intention being to allude to the overwhelming complexity of such technology, whilst also referring to an absence of understanding, as regards to the outcome and intended function.

 The wider body of work features photos made by my parents in their offices throughout their careers. These accompany my own images as well as audio interviews, a soundscape and numerous video performances. This project currently takes the form of an interactive website, but I’m eager to explore new ways to present the work.