Self-Direction Lounge, 2013

mixed-media installation in ‘Arbeidstid/Work Time’, Henie Onstad Museum

The installation is a play on contemporary working environments and the language of workplace psychology. Several themed areas (or zones) are divided by screens, so that the office becomes a stage or set, in which performance can be measured. It highlights the demands placed on workers within the post-Fordist economy to be entrepreneurial and self-reliant; individuals happily instrumentalising their creativity, striving for personal growth and self-actualisation while accepting less and less job security.

One wall is filled with a life-sized image of hippies playing in a field, enthusiastically participating in New Games – invented by Stewart Brand in 1970s California. Better known as the founder of the countercultural manual the Whole Earth Catalog, Brand was a hero to Steve Jobs, who famously quoted his directive to ‘stay hungry, stay foolish’. But things are not entirely well in this constructed universe. Signs of economic decline and behind-the-scenes decay are just visible through a window at the back. Furniture from the drab cube-like offices – symbolising monotonous working patterns, compensated with the job security of the Fordist era – now exchanged for the new brightly coloured world of insecure freelance status.