Workplace-Installation

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The participatory environment defines and engages the meta-theme of occupation in two ways, through: 1) Our self-identification with our work within systems and 2) Our inhabitation of public workplaces. These themes are central to the experiences that young adults with autism encounter upon their entry into the work world.

 

Their preparation for the navigation of the behaviors, interactions and conventions of society, and their heightened reactions to visual and auditory stimuli, suggest a parallel between autistic and normative experience. Our socialization through a barrage of pictorial and indexical symbols and icons are not unlikely the pictorial languages that have been developed to aid communication for people with autism. Our reliance upon routines, repetition and predictability facilitates our functioning in society, echoing the anchor of routine that enables young adults with autism to enter the work world. While we usually process, filter and sublimate the illogic of social conventions, they cannot.

 

In this installation, the audience will move through two spaces, the first an entry corridor that presents a sequence of symbols and icons, simulacra of the worlds we desire and work to inhabit. This condensed process of socialization may or may not prepare the audience to cross the boundary into the Sidney R. Yates Gallery, a heightened audio/ visual space bounded by the monumental, civic facades of the space. A digital soundscape, a collage of workaday sounds, will magnify the stimuli of the work world, prompting the audience to engage or recoil in sensory overload.

 

 

Artistic Director: BJ Krivanek

 

Graphic Designer: KJ Kim, Kang Bum Lee, Ziwu Zhou, Bethany Armstrong

 

2008