work search form

The text within this piece sources the Work Search Form found from the U.S. Department of Labor, a printed document that attempts to quantify or measure the attempts in being a working, “productive” citizen. It is often used to file for unemployment benefits. My artwork uses natural language processing to poke fun of the text, jumbling the already mystifying legalese of government papers. Cotton pages of my filled out work search form entries (generated using Tracery) are scattered throughout intermittently.

For this project, I wanted to create a physical manifestation of two earlier exercises I practiced (particularly with Markov chains and the tracery library). The book contains two kinds of pages, pink forms to be filled out and cotton white pages stuffed in between attempting to answer and respond to each of the pink forms.

For the pink forms, I first used markov chain to create separate generators for each category. Then, I used tracery to create the container of which each generation can be formatted within. Through the jumbling, Work Search Forms turned into pages and pages of Work Fork Forms, Work Fork Seark Forch Searms, and sometimes even Worms. They also seemed to insist that I fill out all my simployment instructivities. Then, I formatted the generations into Adobe Illustrator using the official form as a base template. I exported the PDF and then printed them out onto pink copy paper, using the same material of the original form my parents filled out.

For the white cotton batting, I printed out generations of this previous homework assignment that we did during Tracery week. The soft, human tactility of the cotton batting contrasts with the rigidity of administrative paperwork, embodying my attempt to physically and emotionally force myself into institutional frameworks that were never designed to hold lived experience. The work highlights the exhaustion and absurdity of navigating systems where access to health, food, and survival is contingent upon performing productivity.

The last page contains a transparent sheet of silk organza with source code to my white cotton batting pages printed on top of it.