Dreaming About Work 0.9: For Loop Contingency

2021 digital game/simulation, Installation, Full-HD Video

GPT-2 quote: “We work in a culture where the workplace is a battlefield. The most basic human activity, whether it's walking a long way to work, cooking a meal or even looking at a product, requires the interaction with someone outside of oneself. As much as it hurts to say, automation is also the way we live.”

The present is at the same time recursive, biological and cybernetic. The office is being replaced by digital logic, feedback and recursion erases the distance between employees. Social reality thus creates discontinued battlefields of workspaces, on which it shortens its feedbacks. In parallel technological reality creates soft boundaries of control, expressed by desire and pain, which slowly displaces hard boundaries of physical space.

Dreaming about work 0.9 explores the dromena of work and repetitive activity, closely connected with automation of work and forms of loss of one's own individuality during the labour process. Dreaming about work focuses on the mechanics influencing our ethical values and their relationship to human resource programming and our social environment.

Game simulation places the viewer/player into the role of office manager; she has the duty to control work of other employees, but also to manage her own time properly: To maintain workers performance while keeping the production norm which is not sustainable in the long run as the employees are slowly getting replaced by algorithms. The algorithm of the digital office extends the thesis of the game by a moral dilemma within the game interactions, the game allegory of control becomes a critique of contemporary alienated work. The player decides whether to keep the work loop, whether to send an unproductive employee home, when to have a break, or when to replace human workers with fully-automated machines. The game loop works with explicit boredom, anxiety and alienation of the workspace.

 Installation at TIC Brno, Soundtrack by Václav Janoščík, programming by Filip Hauer and Michal Žák.

www.filiphauer.com