Introduction
Novelty of factory labour
Productivity as a national concern
Asian values
Cleanliness
Consciousness and control
Network of operators
Flatted factories as sites of visions
Mass Psychogenic Illness
Industrial toxicities
How to handle hysterical factory workers
Sightings
Experiences of a friend
Gross National Distress
Directions for an instrument
1983
Ballad of the graveyard shift
Highly infectious
Interpretations of an outbreak
Let the machines sweat/sing/sleep
I dream of surplus
Shrunken desires
Dear passenger
Graveyard shift girls
Bibliography & Acknowledgements
Ballad of the graveyard shift
Inspired by Zainab Mahmood’s account of the grueling "4-4-3-3" shift rotation, this work explores the sonic potential of the factory punch card. By feeding these chronological records into a custom music box, the worker's schedule is transformed into a mechanical melody. This automated performance—made possible through a collaboration with Basil Tan, who engineered the machine’s fluid motion and aesthetic form—serves as a subversive echo of the "piped music" once used to pacify factory floors.
The work hinges on a poignant irony: the music only exists where parts of the card is missing(the holes punched to mark attendance). The worker’s presence is documented through a series of absences, suggesting a surrender of the "quotidian subjective self" to the industrial time. By punching in, the worker announces their role to the firm and the world; this machine provides the soundtrack to that announcement.
