My first office

[imomus]

Yesterday something extraordinary happened to me. I was handed the keys to my first office. It's a glass-walled space in the Media Architecture department of the Future University, and sits at the top of a cascade of esplanades or 'work decks' within the glass hangar of the main university building. As technicians fussed around installing and networking a computer for me, a 17" G4 Powerbook, I felt an odd mixture of emotions, which I will now number for you in the form of bullet points on my new whiteboard:

Point 1. Surely there's been some mistake! I am a rocker, a poete maudit, a scurrilous rogue, a pirate, a masturbator! I do not deserve an office! Offices are for landlubbers! We poete maudit pirate types are more likely to see the inside of a prison cell than an office! What a strange thing has come to pass!

Point 2. I absolutely must not download any porn to this computer, or play with myself under the desk. I am now a responsible person, an adult, a member of society, an educator, one who must form impressionable youth and turn a blind eye to its nubile curves, its pert... no, no, stop, stop, Professor! Think of death, dentistry and taxes...

Point 3. But I absolutely deserve this office. I, if anyone, should have an office in a forward-thinking university, a university of the future! For I am brilliant, one of the great minds of my generation! Imagine if people like me were all given offices, and library passes, and a bunch of electronic equipment, and free time to brainstorm! What an amazingly playful, experimental, edgy, exciting place the world would become!

Point 4. Some extraordinary things have happened this week. I've been offered my own weekly column in a British national newspaper (can't say which until it's confirmed) and the authorship of an art book by a leading art publisher (ditto). But these are sort of freelance things, things I'll do lying on my couch in my bathrobe. They won't change me existentially. They won't really feel like promotion or give me a sense of power. Being given one's own office is quite different. It may only be for six weeks, but it feels like tenure, like mastery.

Point 5. Memories of offices. Other people's offices. My father's office at the British Council, Kolonaki Square, Athens, my father's office at Concordia University, Montreal. Taking the train downtown to visit my father, entering the big modern cube, riding to the fifth floor, greeting my father's secretary. Although I've become more famous than my father, I've never become more important than him. I've never had a secretary.

Point 6. Would I have had an office if I'd become a grad student? Does my brother have an office at Anglia Polytechnic University? I suppose he must. I wonder if he has a secretary? Probably a departmental secretary. I must ask him.

Point 7. These shelves look so bare, I must go down to the library and check out books by Gregory Bateson and people like that so that it looks as if I'm working on some really high level stuff. And maybe I could copy Lehan next door and stick suggestive phrases from Deleuze on the walls to keep me in a fertile, speculative frame of mind.

Point 8. I'll put one of the chairs from the table by the whiteboard in front of my desk so that I can say to people, fellow academics, 'You must drop by, I'm in 526, I'd like to discuss Huizinga's 'Homo Ludens' with you, I hear that's your speciality.'

Point 9. Flashback to the New Year holiday. Staying at my sister's place, watching the DVD of The Office. Am I David Brent now? Will I call people into my office, crack miscalculated jokes and play my songs to them on an acoustic guitar at great length?

Point 10. How's it going to feel when I no longer have an office? I retire from academia in March. Will I still have the stomach for the high seas, the scurrilous skull and crossbones? Or will I have left my heart in the future, in this cool transparent cube?

Comments

[emobus.livejournal.com]

Halfway through reading this series of revelations I posted a comment saying you should top it off by watching "The Office" ... then after posting I realized that "The Office" is in Point 9 ... very good.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

We really have to have a chat about your ADD, Emobus. Come and see me in my office, 4 o'clock.

[yourpony.livejournal.com]

your father was a professor at Concordia? what did he profess to know, and did you spend time in la belle ville much growing up?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

My dad was head of the TEFL department. Teaching English was obviously a bit of a hot potato at the height of the Quebec separatist movement. I stayed mostly out in Beaconsfield, attending Macdonald High School, but went in on Saturdays to Concordia for art classes, or to abuse the photocopier in my dad's office.

[shadowblue.livejournal.com]

Congratulations.

The world may be a very strange place, but at least, in pockets, it seems to be moving in the right direction, if you've got an office now.

Next, we need to get you into government.

[eduard-green.livejournal.com]

This is an excellent plan.

Maybe a secret society needs to be formed that steers interesting people to positions of influence...

[I would like to point out I'm not a nutter, just dreaming].

[martylog.livejournal.com]

When do you get your first business cards?

[cataptromancer.livejournal.com]

>"Would I have had an office if I'd become a grad student?"

Momus as a grad student is an amusing idea. Would you become disheveled and discontent?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Reviews of my records often sneer about how I make music 'for the grad student set'. I'm not even sure quite what being a grad student entails. It's when you graduate, but don't leave, right?

[museumfreak.livejournal.com]

Re point 2: Future University strikes me as pretty, but rather Foucaultian, or even Orwellian. It's like "Oh, look, here's the Future for you: but oh, look, it's a prison, it's a panopticon, but you won't care because it's pretty and there are nice computers."

Of course that could broadly be said of a lot of technology these days, couldn't it?

[shadowblue.livejournal.com]

The Pretty Panopticon ought to be the name of a book. Or something.

[azzy23.livejournal.com]

Good lord, pirate in a box.

I have an office, but it isn't nearly as shiny as yours. Also, it's the "scrubbers" office. Not really an office at all. It's an equipment room. I'm merely another piece of equipment. I'm so jealous.

I used to have a window... but they took it away.

Don't throw any rocks, no matter how tempting, no matter how the pretty sound of breaking glass taunts you. It's bad.

[kineticfactory.livejournal.com]

I see that university departments that deal in the interplay of art and technology all look fairly similar, down to the multilevel concrete/steel/glass panel design, open spaces and conspicuous Apple computers. Your office reminds me of the building at Monash University where the First Iteration conference (http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~iterate/FI/index.html) was held in 1999, and various academics, artists and electronic musicians presented papers on various topics.

In a past life, I was an Associate Lecturer, and before that, a Senior Tutor; in both cases, I got an office of my own. It's one of those givens of academic life. My offices were considerably smaller and less impressive looking, though.

[yanatonage.livejournal.com]

Now that you mention that, NYU's Interactive Telecommunications department, home of Douglas Rushkoff and Clay Shirky and others, looks very similar, glass walls and all.

[yanatonage.livejournal.com]

You've become domesticated...our little sound collagist and cultural critic is all grown up!

point 11.

[wrighter.livejournal.com]

point eleven. you must break all those rules. download porn. play with yourself underneath the desk. and have something write about in the new column. after all, would a "forward-thinking" university of the future not understanding progressive behavior?

congratulations. well earned. and a beautiful one it is.

[kojapan.livejournal.com]

Point 9 made me laugh.

Tweed?

[eduard-green.livejournal.com]

Is this really your first office or just your first interesting one?

So what is this job- what is future university? Universe City!

Must google all terms I don't know.

Do you wear tweed?

Re: Tweed?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I wore tweed in the video for 'Marquis of Sadness' (see the Man of Letters (http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?tab=1&type=product&id=1341936&skuId=6177745&productCategoryId=cat02081) DVD), a song in which I play a corrupt writer in residence who'll 'get along quite nicely in this university, in my little office with its sofa and its key, they'll call on me at all hours for gin and sympathy, bringing bad but intimate poetry'. But here in Hakodate I'm closer to the character in another song written around the same time, who sings about 'this purity as cold as spring snow in the wind on the island of Hokkaido'.

[rciaodree.livejournal.com]

Homo Ludens is a fabulous book. I'm so happy to see another reference to it.

[fufurasu.livejournal.com]

The office and the Mac, beautiful though they may be, are sterile, clean, and tidy, which are not adjectives that would describe your sound project as I imagined it. You must remain the pirate and make yourself at home in the new office. Suggestions:

1) Rearrange the two tables into a squarish block, and have your visitors seating next to you, rather than you and them being separated by a desk (with you in the position of authority).

2) Wrap the strip lights in sheets of colourful film. I know you like fluorescence, but it will instantly make your cell in the white grid stand out.

3) Shun the whiteboard, buy boxes of oil crayons, and use your glass wall for diagrams, drawings, notes, and lists. Encourage your visitors to draw and sign on the glass.

4) Cover the floor with the output of the university's document shredders. Allow footsteps to make sounds.

Leave your chair and the 17" PB alone. They're cool.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

*Thinks in role of academic*: This upstart has some damned good ideas, must be after my job. I'll have to humiliate him with some subtle snubs and dark sarcasm.

[jimyojimbo.livejournal.com]

My experience of having your own Grad office:

a) Sit down

b) Field telephone call from supervisor: "Yes, the paper will be ready soon. Yes, I have read that 100 page paper on the theory of event coding."

c) cry

d) make a cheese toastie

So you're not in the club until you've eaten shite and cried. it's the LAW!!!

Beautiful office. Where did I go wrong?

[xmilkfedx.livejournal.com]

ahh, when i was moved into my own office i was overjoyed at the fact that i could work in peace and quiet.

my cutting table, only a few steps away
books and books about grid systems and color, right behind me.
being able to take off uncomfortable corporate pumps and kick them to the side of your desk!

congratulations and enjoy these simple pleasures!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I'm very excited, the department bought me a denki poto, one of those electric thermos tea water boilers that's always hot. So now I can read Gregory Bateson while making collages of insect noises... and drink green tea at the same time! Simple pleasures indeed, but deep ones.

[plastickitty.livejournal.com]

You look wonderful in that office! It really suits you!

[zoomardav.livejournal.com]

Ok,

http://www.cubefigures.com/

When the company I work for produced these, I didn't think to design one with an eyepatch.

It will have to wait for series two. Momus Cube.

[(Anonymous)]

You look like a scientist! You should carefully mic the room and plan out a daily schedule of things to do and add to it each time you come in. Like first you walk in and shake the welcome mat 3 times, throw your shoes against the wall, drop change into a glass of tea, etc. Or maybe record a situation and play it back through different liquids.

One thing you certainly have to have; piles of paperwork blown around constantly by silent fans.

Adam

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Sheer poetry!

[smakake.livejournal.com]

it's a beautiful office.
cx

[(Anonymous)]

it should be spelled poète maudit.

great office ! great view ! i am jealous.

-alexandre (http://mnemosyne.foolong.org/)

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Thanks, Alexandre, I've corrected it (except for the accent, which I can't remember how to do).

[chronovore.livejournal.com]

You managed an office in Japan, which ever seems to me to be about lumping as many equal-ranking-types in a room as possible. ¡Congratulations! You've achieved something suiting your uniqueness.

That is awesome

[kevingc.livejournal.com]

That. is. one. awesome. office.

[qscrisp.livejournal.com]

Well, I hope you get along quite nicely in this university, In your little office... I just noticed there's no sofa.

[d-g-m.livejournal.com]

My first thought was "fuck you have a boreing house".
Mmmm. I bought a digital camera Monday. And asides from the fact I can now submit work I'm still making 20 second Quicktime jerk off movies for my boyfriend.
Who do you use to host your photo's?
The rest of the world needs to see my cat.
right now.