DEPARTMENT OF INEFFICIENCY DEPARTMENT was an extended durational and interactive performance that engaged hyperreality tv gaming and improvisational play as we explored antiproductivity, the art and joy of queer failure, and a surprising love of bureaucracy. we imagined a fictionalized office and stepped into role as the three last employees of that office the week it was being shut down. we were together in a physical office space in the financial district of and streamed live into a virtual 3D space created in three.js, which had three raw live-feed videos triangulated, three live security-feed videos in black and white, two recorded informational videos on DOID and the office closure, several office furniture and materials as 3D assets spinning around the world, and the skybox was an alternating 360 video (for our meetings at the beginning and end of each day) and composite video of all our feeds (being distorted and colorized using audiovideo reactivity in Max/MSP in response to an office soundscape we created). the skybox video broke down more and more as the servers malfunctioned further and further throughout the course of the week. within the fiction, we imagined online participant audiences as former employees (sometimes disgruntled) sending in their incomplete work after a stint of massive layoffs. they would input "support tickets" and "employee reviews" into Mad Libs-styled prompts on the website, and we would generally set out to respond in real-time. the three performers also started the workday with 30 tasks each, which we'd pick from a hat at the morning meeting and set out to complete throughout the day (and was essentially a repurposing of John Cage's Chance Protocols). throughout, the course of the 40-hour week, 8 hours each day from 11am-7pm, play became the game of endurance. for myself specifically, i stepped more and more fully into imaginative and deviant play, queering childrens games like tea parties, house, and doctor, giving impromptu speeches on various topics, and creating various cooking and instructional shows in the moment - all driven through complete improvisation. one person described it as "so incredibly pointless and poigniant at the same time." and basically, we were examining relationships to work, performing sometimes meaningless tasks and giving them meaning, and navigating blurred lines of consent along the way - all within a context and world where we had enough agency from the encounter/witness relationship we had with our audience to place our own sense of care and affirmation first (and that was heavily challenged on a few occasions). but as we had created a space of expression for ourselves, we were able to interrogate some of the more problematic tasks we reveived and queer them at a safe distance from any immediate danger.

ari glenn mombrea (lead video / UX designer & performer), Alexander Grudzinski (lead sound designer & performer), Jay Reinier (lead level designer & videographer), brynn asha walker (lead game designer, worldbuilder & performer). performed April 14-18 & one final hour on May 5th.