theministries

work in progress

The Ministries

The ministries is an ongoing project that tries to capture an abstraction of the post Y2K generation. It is dealing with the physical/nonphysical paradox of the now in a semi-fictional way.

I am collecting weird articles, interpretations and voices and add them to my own. Together they form fictional institutions, that illustrate a different state of being. The ministries is a setup that is supposed to work as an umbrella to my body of work. It uses the rhetorics of the field of politics.

Bureaucracy (1) touches everybodys life in many ways. Not only in politics, but also in art, technology and economics, just to name a few, the bureaucrats have taken over. We all know how it is to wait in line in order to pay for the wrong document, clicking agree on every agreement that is being thrown at us. You can not be a not user!

This common knowledge makes the concept of the ministries a working situation. It opens the door to experience with a certain set of expectations that than can be abstracted and deformed in a multi sensory experience.

I use existing structures, fill them with new content and test what it does to the visitor or the discussion partner. By doing so, I hope to be able to create interest in ideas. If there are fitting proposals, discussions or works I would like to name Ministers, Bureau chiefs and local managers.

EIN HOCH AUF DIE BÜROKRATIE

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“ Sam Lowry:      Excuse me, Dawson, can you put me through to Mr. Helpmann’s office?

Dawson:     I’m afraid I can’t sir. You have to go through the proper channels.

Sam Lowry:     And you can’t tell me what the proper channels are, because that’s classified information?

Dawson:     I’m glad to see the Ministry’s continuing its tradition of recruiting the brightest and best, sir.

Sam Lowry:     Thank you, Dawson.” (2)

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(1) bureaucracy
noun
noun: bureaucracy
1. a system of government in which most of the important decisions are taken by state officials rather than by elected representatives.
2. excessively complicated administrative procedure.

(2) Brazil is a 1985 dystopian[9] science fiction film[10] directed by Terry Gilliam. The film centres on Sam Lowry, a man trying to find a woman who appears in his dreams while he is working in a mind-numbing job and living in a small apartment, set in a consumer-driven dystopian world in which there is an over-reliance on poorly maintained (and rather whimsical) machines. Brazil’s bureaucratic, totalitarian government is reminiscent of the government depicted in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four,[11][12] except that it has a buffoonish, slapstick quality and lacks a Big Brother figure.