9-5 visualizes the immaterial labour of a working day in an office. 9-5 was developed while my residency at MEANTIME Cheltenham. Thanks to Sarah B., she made it all possible.

9-5 consists of an autonomous robot vehicle, a multilayered, in different colours painted board and a network analyzer. The vehicle and the network analyzer are equipped with a wireless device. The network analyzer collects data from the local network and sends it to the vehicle. The transmitted information is used for the choreography for the vehicle.

While the vehicle is moving it is scraching the surface with a spiky metal pin. Through continious scratching a coloured drawing emerges as a mirror of the data traffic in the local network.

No data will be stored and no content will be evaluated. Privacy is granted.

9-5 is a follow-up to Will Work For Food. Will Work For Food is about the value of labour and 9-5 is about efficiency and visibility.

Everybody can rent the 9-5 system to represent their working day in their office. The rent calculate as follows: 8 hours multiplied with the minimum wage plus material costs. The client can keep the result in form of the scratched drawing.

9-5 is meant to raise our awareness of the way society influences every aspect of our lives–from the macro economic level experienced at work to the everyday objects we take for granted–all of which express a repressive and authoritarian culture. 9-5 deals with the desire to find a new definition for the value labour and the act of working. It takes a position towards the question what role labour plays in a time, when full employment becomes an unattainable utopian conception. With reference to the utopian ideas of the 50s and 60s of the 20th century which yearned for the liberation of humanity from any form of labour 9-5 plays with the possibility to fulfill this dream and takes over the role of the precarious subject.

Besides the economic impact 9-5 is also about the representation of immaterial labour. Since most of the virtual activities stay invisible there is a desire to have a physical representation.

Tangible Response has been the first client of 9-5. They are one of the UK’s most rewarding brand-responsive agencies. They allowed me to come to their office and use data from their local computer network for a representation of an average working day at them .

The vehicle was placed on painted 5ft x 3ft board. Then the computer grabbed all available data from the local network, for example UDP packets which printers and file servers send when they are avilable or data form a local proxy server. This data has been send to the vehicle. The vehicle used the received data for a choreography of its movements.

After 8 hours of scratching the drawing represents an average working day at the office of Tangible Response.

The drawing was sold to Tangible Response for £5.73 per hour, which is the minimum wage in the UK plus £75.00 material costs.