The vernacular of the office is a constant and unavoidable presence in many of our lives, a sub-culture that spans disciplines, boundaries and societies. HRI (Unpaid Internship) takes that language and distills it into a microcosm — an immersive performance and installation that reconfigures the workplace as a musical instrument.

HRI (Unpaid Internship) explores the work/life dichotomy, presenting a meticulously reconstructed cubicle environment — slightly shifted and rescaled — to recreate the experience of the unpaid internship 5-10 minutes at a time. The customized space transforms data entry into performance, and serves as an ode to the common office worker. Visitors are enticed to take a shift as “unpaid interns” at HRI, a fictitious (yet thoroughly convincing) company, immersing themselves in a familiar cubicle workspace with a salaried everyman in the adjacent cubicle. As each intern completes a simple data entry task, she slowly comes to recognize that she is participating in a duet.