Clare Strand

The Betterment Room - Devices for Measuring Achievement is a study examining the visual identity and behaviour of the post-industrial worker, taking as a starting point the photographic time and motion studies of Frank and Lillian Gilbreth (1912), whose activities predate GPS and digital surveillance. In this new study, the blithe, the willing and the compliant are equipped with appropriate mechanisms and attachments, set against grids and clocks to help the study of their productive capacity. The images, however, have an uneasy stasis, signalling that the modern activities we now call work have become more mysterious and less quantifiable. The Cyclegraph series becomes an attempt to analyse and determine the trajectories of Strand's own activity throughout the making of the work, in an effort to make the intangible, tangible - an exercise in absurdism that never the less has its pre-determined function - no matter how pointless.