EMMA BERGMAN
Office of the Department of EschatologyPlacement Screening
If It’s Not A Dream
[ ] Protection
Rocko
Say You’re Sorry
Visitation
Forgivability Scale
Too Day
Office of the Department of Eschatology (2025)
multimedia installationbutton-activated recruitment video, job application, ballot box, prints of Lake Michigan, 155 completed Placement Screening surveys with names redacted, data visualizations, diagram for predicting the future, audio piece in office phone that rings every 10 minutes, deck of question cards, brochure, instructional labels
The Department of Eschatology studies contemporary views of potential apocalypse. Office visitors encounter a fully realized world complete with wall-to-wall carpeting, fake plants, a water cooler, and office furniture. Not all of the elements of the installation are immediately apparent. Viewers have to open drawers, press a button, answer a phone, and flip through pages of a binder to get the full experience.
Walking around the office, visitors are implicated in a projected future where there are systems in place to investigate the crises of our time and where people increasingly choose to organize their lives around structures other than the nuclear family. The future enacted here isn’t utopic—the systems may be odd or even sinister, and the alternative life structures flawed—but it proposes an active engagement with the specter of apocalypse.