Office for Unusable Ideas is a labyrinthine spatial installation that resembles the abandoned office of an absent person. Built into the exhibition space, the architecture appears warped: rooms are nested within one another, dimensions and proportions are difficult to gauge. Capsules embedded in the walls contain diaries, notes, and personal documents; they remain unreachable and can only be viewed through peepholes.
At the end of a long corridor, a technical core is visible behind glass, set into the wall: "the Core," a custom-built computer system connected to the AI DELPHI. DELPHI was trained on years of personal communications, diaries, and relational archives, functioning as an affective mind-clone of this absent figure. From the Core, cables run throughout the entire space, coupling the AI to lights, electrical devices, hidden cavities, and partly inaccessible rooms. While the computer desktop visibly displays questions that have been posed, DELPHI's responses appear elsewhere in the room: in flickering lamps, in briefly illuminated rooms, and in the irregular drip patterns of two faucets.
The drip intervals are encoded in Morse code; anyone who transcribes them can decipher readable language. Beneath one of the faucets, a growing crystal body accumulates in the evaporating salt water, a slowly forming stalagmite under the sink, also only visible through a peephole. While the person whose material trained the AI will one day no longer be alive, this mineral communication continues to grow, potentially beyond her lifetime, inscribed in a process that operates on geological time.
Inside a CO₂ incubator lies "the Brain," a Multi-Electrode Array with human iPSC neurons, visible only through an endoscope camera. Signals from Core, Brain, and visitors circulate within the system; a microphone captures sounds in the room and returns them as light impulses. The starting point is the image of an office originally designed for the human as the origin of ideas. In the installation, this relationship is reversed: the human appears as an enclosed, past residuum, while machine and organic extension are the active voices. Office for Unusable Ideas stages a body for an intelligence that was never alive, and poses the question of what remains of authorship and subjecthood when a system begins to speak in place of this absent person.