CORPORATE JOB
Corporate Job is a very short (about one minute) vignette orgothic short doc, shot in real life and on location. It deals with the realities of many in the so called creative industries and the commercial reality of content creation and creative endeavours can actually mean on the ground. It investigates the contradictions of contemporary creative labour through auto-ethnography. Filmed while undertaking corporate employment and living temporarily in business hotels in random parts of Germany, the research draws on the proposition that contemporary capitalism no longer suppresses artistic values but actively appropriates them. Creativity, authenticity, flexibility, and the injunction to "follow your passion" have themselves become productive forces. The distinction between work and identity collapses as individuals are encouraged to become entrepreneurs of themselves.
The anonymous hotel room functions as an ethnographic field site. Although it appears as a transient, placeless environment, the act of filming transforms it into a space of inquiry. The project documents an attempt to recover agency by converting the lived experience of corporate labour into artistic research. In doing so, it exposes a paradox: even the critique of work, and the search for meaning within it, can become another form of value production.
As one of the Institute's earliest auto-ethnographic projects (well before its founding), Corporate Job established a methodology that continues throughout later research: treating the researcher's own everyday life not as autobiography but as evidence through which broader social and economic structures become visible.