John Pilson: Interregna

These photographs of eerily empty white-collar industrial space document a pre-9/11 moment--the officescape of a 24/7 investment bank at the height of the dot-com bubble, where John Pilson worked as a computer graphics operator on the graveyard shift. Using the opportunities provided by that "dead time," late at night and early in the morning, Pilson undertook to explore his workspace in still photography and video. All the familiar elements are present, and newly prominent under his cubicles, fluorescent light, smeared gray carpet, beige boxes. The title of this book is translated, "between the reigns," and refers to that period when authority is suspended and abandoned structures must do their best to enforce the norms, as Pilson's spaces implacably do. Pilson's troubling record of our inability to understand and therefore control the powers of technology and work in our lives has appeared at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.