Trying to conceive an eight-hour work and making it over the phone and via Zoom means it’s informed by that process. “It’s littered with memes and it has an internetty feel to it,” says McKenzie.

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”Growing up as digital natives has taught us a different form of dramaturgy, one where there are lots of things happening all at once, like that incredible film Everything, Everywhere, All At Once. And that has informed a lot of the way we develop plot and narrative, so there will be lots of things happening and sometimes the thing that connects ideas might be a symbol or an object,” says Gillies. “It’s more like Googling something than reading a novel about something. There’s an internet logic but also a dream logic, we go through a series of worlds with the audiences that are all aesthetically different and symbolically different and we draw on symbols and themes and emotions.”

The collaboration began when the artists were doing shows as part of the Fringe Festival at the Trades Hall in Carlton. There’s a lot of 8/8/8 imagery in that building, says McKenzie, from the obvious in banners through to the carpet and even hanging from the chandeliers. “Also as artists we’re interested in work as a concept, and working as artists, the weird precarity and the trials and tribulations of trying to make work, and trying to conceive of a work-life balance around something that is driven by something you enjoy doing,” he says. “It’s a privilege and a pleasure to be an artist but it’s also difficult and strange sometimes.”

Gillies adds that Trades Hall is really a shrine to this utopian concept. “It’s really nice to look at historic versions of utopia, when society could reimagine a way of us all existing together. We’re very passionate about being at a time in society where we need to look at new and different ways of working,” she says, especially on the back of the pandemic which disrupted our ways of living so dramatically.

McKenzie cites the economist John Maynard Keynes, who back in the 1940s predicted that by now we would only work about 15 hours a week. Clearly that’s far from a reality for most of us: for some work involves 15 hours a day. “Not only has that not happened but the culture has gone in the opposite direction. We’ve also lost the imaginative drive to consider what might be next for a standard working week,” McKenzie says. “There’s a real utopian drive beneath this project, to ignite a certain type of imagining.”

8/8/8: WORK is at the Schoolhouse Studios Coburg on June 4, 9am-5pm. See Rising for details.

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