Philip van Allen

Corporate Delicti was a group exhibition at Nucleus Gallery around the topic of disillusionment with corporate life. Collaborating with student Colin Owen, we built a system of interactive objects from an office – a copier, file cabinet, and fax machine. Painted gray, each object was made interactive by removing the guts and putting sensors and speakers inside.

The copier groaned when someone approached it, and when the “copy” button was pushed, a loop of copying sound played. With each subsequent push, an additional music track was added to the mix.

The file cabinet played more music tracks that synchronized with the copier sound. This track faded up as the user opened the drawer, bringing in more tracks the further the drawer was opened (typing, drums, etc.), In addition, occasionally when the drawer was opened, the sound of crows seemed to jump out of the cabinet and fly across the room as the sound moved from a speaker inside the cabinet to speakers above it, and the across the gallery to speakers in the back.

The fax machine played a loud and ominous sound when the flash-hook on the phone was clicked. It then played a computer voice that read the terms of a contract that indicated the company owned everything created, throughout the universe.

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