#prank4offices
Welding, Philip 
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7169-4789
(2020)
#prank4offices.
Philosophy of Photography.
ISSN 2040-3682
Abstract
A quick search of the hashtag ‘prank4offices’ on Instagram reveals evidence of two co-workers engaged in an office prank war with each other. Evident are a range of pranks including; multiple photographs of Justin Bieber's face neatly arranged to cover a desk, tin foil covering a workspace, belongings balanced precariously in a pile, the entire contents of someone’s desk cling film-wrapped to an office chair and a desk surrounded by hundreds of water-filled cups. The two employees are known as Iamronjay42 and Iaminstapauli0 on the photo sharing website ‘Instagram’. Iamronjay42 and Iaminstapauli0 are in fact fictional characters acting out a fictional office prank war. In reality, they are a vehicle for me to think about the process of making office pranks from the perspective of an artist. For me as an artist, making ‘work’ (in the art sense) is often done in the workplace or in everyday situations, utilising everyday ‘stuff’ to construct temporary arrangements. Don’t tell work, but this is often done on company time too. Making work in this way can sometimes feel like being an illicit ‘artist-in-residence’ in the office, and blurs the boundary between artist and worker. This article features a range of the photographs that make up the project #prank4offices. In a contextual statement about the work, it also proposes that there is a ‘sculptural desire’ in the workplace, and that the visibility of vernacular photography is affecting how users of everyday photographs stage scenes for the camera.
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