Statement of intent
The Office of Control examines the materials and processes enabling authoritarian systems.
Working through psychological models, films, 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 constructed mechanisms—such as moral licensing, economic apartheid, anticipatory compliance—showing not that humans are good or evil, but how systems exploit what humans are.
The practice is committed to the following:
To show the everyday human hand in tools of production. Coercive systems are not the sole project of leadership — they are built through the gradual, accumulated behavior change of ordinary people.
To expose and enlighten audiences to the methods of mass coercion deployed across history, the present, and plausible futures — by politicians, corporations, and any other group seeking to reshape how people think, feel, and act.
To build a critical vocabulary. The work provides frameworks for identifying and naming the mechanisms of control and coercion, making the invisible legible.
To produce impactful, memetic visual material.
To maintain a rigorous diegetic alibi. All work exists within a coherent speculative world grounded in solid concepts. Any speculation is tethered to real psychological, historical, and structural foundations.
To sit knowingly within its art-historical context — alongside institutional critique, speculative practice, and the broader tradition of politically committed work — as a contributing and self-aware participant in those lineages.
To use the materials of bureaucratic production authentically: the plan, the document, the training module, the policy instrument — deployed with diegetic integrity but never at the cost of accessibly.
To release work in discreet, legible phases. Each phase is distinct and purposeful. Larger releases collect phases into coherent bodies of work, each supported by writing that anchors the concepts.
current release phase