Kok-Chian Leong: Corporate Sabotage
shown in conjunction with ISEA festival, San Jose, 2006
The project examines the private politics behind the corporate world, an environment where competitiveness turns into deceit. It focuses on the covert act of sabotaging office communications and equipment to reduce its efficiency in daily operations. This act creates a suspense in the strange imperfections, the unnerving fault finding performed on the equipment and the growing frustrations by the co-workers.
Weapons for the corporate armoury investigates the possibility of designing a weapon that inflicts trauma on your co-worker in a non-lethal manner, thereby allowing you to get ahead in business. The project examines the private politics behind the corporate world, an environment where competitiveness turns into deceit. It focuses on the covert act of sabotaging office communications and equipment to reduce its efficiency in daily operations. This act creates a suspense in the strange imperfections, the unnerving fault finding performed on the equipment and the growing frustrations by the co-workers.
The narrative
The relationship between the co-workers deteriorate as a result.. The consequences became so drastic that the victim's performance drops and eventually loses his job.
The tools/design
The Firefly tool intercepts the scanning job through the use of intermittent bright flashing lights in the scanner. The frequency of activation causes disturbances to the output. The result is random imperfect quality on the final scanned document.
The Woodpecker tool produces irregular stamping action in the printer. This action is synchronised with the mechanical movement of the print head to create an array of patches in the final printout, rendering it useless.
The Cateye tool is basically the eye of the saboteur. It is a spy camera that [provides a visual overview of the victim's actions and intentions. It has to be strategically placed within the operations area.
