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After-Hours
Office Interventions
2000
Photo
documentation
I
worked at the Exploratorium Museum in San Francisco as a graphic
designer for eight years, and attempted various undercover art
projects while there. In this particular one, I hand-made facsimiles
of red floppy disks out of contact paper and foamboard and snuck
into people’s offices when they had gone for the evening.
I placed them in logical situations in order to “blend them”
into the work environment. I took snapshot photographs documenting
each and left them in place. This continued for a few days until
I felt I had sufficiently distributed them.
I never overheard anyone comment upon discovering them. It seems
they had disappeared into their environments quite seamlessly.
I eventually left that job, but years later I know that the disks
are still in circulation: I presented this project to an art class,
and a student related that he had been interning at the Museum
and found one in a desk drawer when he was searching for a disk
to transfer information from one computer to another. He was mildly
perturbed upon discovering that it would not “work.”
I asked him what he then did with it (throw it away?), and he
told me he put it back, since it seemed like the right thing to
do with a thing that looked like a disk.
It gives me hope that these objects are continually circulating,
like small hiccups in the stream of technology.
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