Installment
This is the time of year where the pollen starts to affect my brain, causing, amongst other more mundane effects, me to dream fantastic hallucinatory crazy shit.
Last night’s panorama was a piece of (terribly clever, it seemed at the time) installation art. Basically it was a circle of towering beige boxes that people would interact with, each machine cleverly designed to install frustration in whomever used it.
Machine features included:
- Something involving punch cards, but with documentation so terrible or misleading that you had to ignore instructions in order to use the machine properly.
- Something where you had to communicate with someone in a booth (like in the subway), but the glass was so scratched that you couldn’t make out who was in the booth, and the speaker so terrible you couldn’t hear what they were saying.
- Something that made you run from one station to another, with each station telling you to get something from another station before it can complete your request; but it turns out to be a big loop that makes accomplishing the original goal impossible.
Note that I don’t do installation art and never have, but it seems clear to me how you could somewhat abstractly capture the essence of bureaucracy without having to dabble in whatever the actual subject matter might be.
