Wednesday 19 July 2017

out to pasture

Professor and conceptual artist Pippin Bar has created a browser-based simulation, as Hyperallergic informs, that recaptures the tremolo sense of accomplishment of clicking things away and tedium of unrelenting but mild distractions of a real office-setting whose output is constantly under siege by work-motivators (commission-forming, superfluous meetings and other forms of pep-rallies) for human workers to wean themselves on once automation takes over these skeuomorphic tasks once and for all. While some workplace applications may have grown a bit more predictive and proactive in their behaviours since, it’s telling how the 1990s backdrop for It is as if you were doing work instantly dates it but there’s precious little process-improvement in the intervening decades and certainly not the sort that wins extra leisure-time (if anything, the opposite) for the worker. What do you think? Does it already feel like your job is keep up the pretence for a Potemkin office?