HOW TO EAT AN APPLE (AT THE OFFICE), 2022
With Liping Hua
Eindhoven, The Netherlands
How to eat an apple (at the office) is an allegory to the idea of interpassivity and the workolace as a space of experimentation, psychologically.
The term interpassivity, is the opposite of interactivy, describing a state of passivity, particularly cognitive or emotional passivity, enabled or facilitated by the appearance or potential of interactivity. The delegation of an act, can be found in many aspects of our daily lives, for example in media, whereby a piece of art or technology seems to act on the audience or the user’s behalf.
Taking the specific context of the Reddit thread, “Can you eat snacks at your cubicle/office jobs?”, we considered the different ways of eating an apple as a symbol of hierachy in the office, Workers are distracted by this “freedom” to eat an apple at their own will. This can be seen as a simple way to encourage a sense of care and belonging to the company, creating underlying pressure of contribution, translating to a new mode of stress.
Employees are captured in this built illusion, where the main problems that exist in the structure of the workspaces are kept disguised and disregarded.