Products for Organising
Simon Denny’s work engages with surveillance, digital technology, the politics of architectural spaces, branding and corporate management strategies. For his exhibition, Products for Organising at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery, a former gunpowder store, Denny has created a mixed media installation, using found objects, video, printed graphics and texts. The exhibition revolves around contemporary management practices and the history of hacking. Diagrams and flow charts share a space with soft toys and cans of Red Bull in Denny’s examination of the spatial organisation and ideologies of security agencies and corporations, and the way that hacking has influenced their practices. The exhibition is divided into two sections labelled ‘Products for Emergent Organisations’ and ‘Products for Formalised Organisations’, respectively. The history of hacking is highlighted on one side of the gallery, while the management strategies used by corporations and government agencies are probed on the other. In a series of doughnut shaped sculptures on the right hand side of the gallery, ‘Products for Formalised Organisations’ uses the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) and commercial tech companies, like Apple and Zappos, as case studies, in order to shed light on their respective models of internal organisation. The circular sculptures are similar to large architectural models turned up on their sides and are inspired by the floorplan of each organisation’s headquarters. In these buildings we can assume visibility is heightened by their circular form. Two of the circular sculptures are overlaid with text, diagrams and organisational charts describing the managerial techniques Holocracy and Agile. Holocracy, a system for re-distributing authority throughout an organisation, aims to remove hierarchy and promote autonomy. Agile on the other hand, grew out of software development methods and emphasises flexibility. By using