statement of intent
the practice
The Office of Control examines the materials and processes enabling authoritarian systems. Working through plans, diagrams, institutional artifacts, and media, the practice reveals how seemingly banal mechanics of architecture, bureaucracy, and process transform into instruments of coercion, surveillance, and social ordering.
These frameworks are designed to feel unsettlingly proximate to current reality: conditions of economic bifurcation where established social contracts fragment and power structures revert to extractive norms. Control operates through contemporary mechanisms—mass digital media, behavioral economics, administrative automation—deploying models and materials tested across centuries.
The practice draws from The Office of Control Coercion Models Library: a continuously expanding repository of psychological, social, and behavioral models that enable human complicity in systems of harm. The library documents established and speculative mechanisms—attribution errors, moral licensing, economic apartheid, anticipatory compliance—showing not that humans are good or evil, but how systems exploit what humans are.
The Office of Control releases work in systematic series, demonstrating how catastrophic systems emerge through ordinary bureaucratic production. These systems are enacted by ordinary people through ordinary means, occasionally resulting in spectacular architecture or media, yet always originating in the minds of regular people.
And yet, inside The Office of Control, while procedural corporate-governmental planning is the principal task, there are glimpses of humanity: tells of spirit, of expression, and fleeting moments of attempted significance by some who work within. These ask us to ponder whether those in The Office of Control could be turned to work for something positive—or perhaps offer further evidence that at the heart of monstrous systems are not orderly machines, but people, appropriated and trapped by systems of rules and behavioral cycles of their own making. Slight signals of humanity blink out from their work, asking us to draw nearer, to think about their humanity.
three emerging principles
1. human glimpses
The work reveals the people inside bureaucratic systems through their expressions—the folk art of administration, the unauthorized creativity that seeps through corporate communications, the handmade quality of even the most procedural documents.
We look for the human fingerprint on institutional outputs: the PowerPoint slide that exceeds the style guide, the architectural drawing where someone's hand is visible, the memo that carries a trace of personality. These are not errors but glimpses—moments where the person surfaces through the procedure, where humanity refuses total suppression.
2. underlying psychology
Beneath every bureaucratic framework lie fundamental human drives: the need for control, the fear of chaos, the desire for belonging, the susceptibility to coercion. The work examines the psychological and behavioral mechanisms that recruit ordinary people into extraordinary systems—not to judge whether human nature is fundamentally cooperative or competitive, benevolent or destructive, but to ask the question openly.
The Coercion Models Library documents these mechanisms: behavioral economics, evolutionary psychology, the irrational emotional substrate that drives what appears rational on the surface. The work doesn't claim humans are good or evil. It shows how systems exploit what humans are.
3. material amplification
Like a Japanese craftsperson who allows the grain of wood or the texture of stone to speak through the finished object, we treat the materials of bureaucracy—PowerPoint, architectural drawings, policy documents, organizational charts, propaganda films—not as neutral carriers of content but as materials with their own qualities, their own expressions, their own baroque possibilities.
The work doesn't make the best PowerPoint. It makes the most PowerPoint PowerPoint—the essence of the form, amplified and clarified. Not to mock it, but to reveal what it is: a medium that people in offices live with intimately, develop relationships with, sometimes play baroque tunes on when the style guide isn't watching. The trigger sometimes pulls the finger.
This material exploration connects to how bureaucrats actually work. They do get close to these tools—pencils, templates, software, forms—as if they were assistants, or helpers, or sometimes overlords. There's a folk creativity in corporate environments, visible when people ignore guidelines and make something human with institutional materials. And this exposes the tension: if they're so human, what are they doing making something so faceless?
tension
There is a fundamental conflict between the rational face of bureaucratic objects and the irrational emotional substrate of the humans producing them. These emotions, this irrationality, this humanity—they need a face. They need to surface in the material somehow.
The work has to signal the human trace—not just smudges and footprints and patina, but something closer to an exhortation of humanity. Not necessarily a cry for help, but evidence that someone is there, that beneath the procedure is a person.
At the crossroads of material amplification and psychological exposure, we find human glimpses in the visualization. We see someone there. And then the interesting question emerges: what are the motivations and drivers keeping these humans in the bureaucracy, keeping them making it? What holds them? What recruits them? What makes them complicit?
upcoming release
Speculative Bureaucracy: Models of Coercion