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Introduction > Prose > Poem > Visual Poem Ethnography of a design studio in the mobile telecoms industry 1"Constant sound in the background: I suddenly noticed the incessant roar of the air-conditioning, the ever-present mechanical grind of the printer. The air seemed empty of life, the ambient lighting bare grey without any warmth or brightness. "I feel sucked dry by the noise. Like the marrow of my life has been leached away in every mechanical breath upon me". I stand in the design studio and the world tilts, topples. My legs shrink, hips sucked on hard to the tops of my legs. Knees bypass my calf muscles and collapse into my ankles. This place... It's grey maw, open, agape, swallowing me - partially. Tasting my flesh and teasing it away from my body. The juicy parts sucked into waiting screens, into burgundy chairs, black desks. My body dismembered by anti-light, a light without light, a light without sanctuary, a light that casts no shadow, that creates and inspires no line or shape, no limb to move. The windows translate the sky into a corporate sky. The sun into a corporate sun. Grey and pallid it is the penumbral brand of the corporation, neither shadow nor light. I have chosen to stand here, willing, in this ethnography, to stand and fight the erasure. I'm desperate to escape. Not to leave, but to escape. The bland white walls, the bland white floor, the bland grey air, the bland monitors are fluid, expanding, pressing against me, plastic stretching, warping towards me, stamping its outline in to me. Digestibility, the metaphor of eating the other, is the word: I had been partially 'incorporated' by mobile telecoms company. The ethnography made me sick, as I fought and resisted, but there is no separation in ethnography. I was there, my legs shrank, my body was thinned to paper. My burgundy blood stains the design studio. I am altered, I have been altered. There was never any escape. Ethnography is never objective. (c) Laura Watts |