Divergent Organisation for Hierarchical Labour  (DOHL)

Role playing and radical world building discussion card game




2014 - ongoing project
Played at _ :
Malmö Art Academy (SE)
RES Enclave Projects, London (UK)
GI, Glasgow International (UK)
Utopian Studies Conference, Newcastle (UK)
HIAP residency, Helsinki (FI)
SØ Gallery, Copenhagen (DK)
Chelsea College of Art, London (UK)
Spike Island, Bristol (UK)




DOHL out the cards
Join the DOHL Queue




Using 53 Prefixes, 45 Suprafixes and 53 Suffixes and drawing a simple 4 card profession there can be forty eight million, three hundred and sixty six thousand, five hundred and twenty eight unique combinations. A free-form point of departure for discussion, DOHL allows you to randomly select your own niche professional specialisation to suggest characteristics of an alternate self, an avatar to be discussed outside reality and inside a newly embodied world. Using prefixes, suprafixes and suffixes, you create a turbo-fuelled niche business card filler and become subject to a cocktail of jargon and acronyms present within the academic, scientific, artistic, social media and brand marketing transdisciplinary labour worlds of today.
Parody of the division of white collar Labour forces within the western world, the increasingly splintered specialisation of creative energies into increasingly niche bubbles of rehashed / freelance / intern-centric careers is posed here as a formalised role-play discussion about the future. The harvesting of 'Cognitive Surplus' (Clay Shirky) is being redistributed as digital labour; networked pixelocratic forces of amateurism, via crowdsourcing and the combined efforts of individuals we have achieved, what McLuhan called, 'a total awareness of the individual'.