CORPORATE POEMS:1440 Broadway, 375 Hudson Street
Video installation with monitors, speakers, 2019, 66” x 25” x 30”
Corporate Poems 1440 Broadway and Corporate Poems 375 Hudson Street are recordings of an animated character delivering short monologues that reflect the binary concepts central to office life: creativity vs. anti-creativity, efficiency vs. inefficiency, hierarchy vs. democracy, and standardized activities vs. refined processes in a corporate space.
Corporate Poems 1440 Broadway (Left, 00:55) and Corporate Poems 375 Hudson Street (Right, 01:02)
Whether at a private pitch or a presentation for a group of people, speech occurs all the time in the office. Sometimes it is directly related to a specific project, personnel, or policy, and employees keep discussing and sharing their opinions publicly and privately. There are endless opposing opinions on many different platforms: emails, chats, slacks, blogs, social networks, etc.
Transcript, Corporate Poem 1440 Broadway
“The corporate environment requires employees to think, reason, and perform at optimum levels. Also it demands acquiring specific training to habituate the complicated skill set needed to develop the ideological products. In my job as a Design Lead, having had to develop certain cognitive computational skills in order to keep up with the corporation's goals resembles that of algorithmic logic in computer science as Leon Trotsky emphasizes it as a ‘permanent revolution’.”
Transcript, Corporate Poem 375 Hudson Street
"The interiors of all these spaces were trendy and contemporary, filled with marble, glass, metal, and designer furniture. Like a scene from Jacques Tati’s 1973 film Playtime, I even walked into a giant glass wall at one point.8 While working in these simple, sleek, and cold office spaces, I encountered a wilderness inside their refrigerators. They displayed foods and beverages in different states without strategy or pretension. The wilderness was a by-product of consumption. The contents varied depending on the office. They held different brands, some had more containers from home, and some had healthier options. The scenes differed from day to day and at different times of the day. The refrigerators were cleaned out every Friday at 3pm. In the middle of the weekday, they reached peak capacity and chaos."
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