9 Minus 5

9 Minus 5 is a mix between a "game" and an interactive critical art piece on the growing role of AI in displacing tech workers. Framed as a corporate terminal experience, users "clock in" to a job performing monotonous verification tasks (meant to simulate CAPTCHAs) while company-wide notices slowly reveal that an AI is being installed, trained on their work, and ultimately deployed to replace them entirely. The piece was motivated by the wave of mass tech layoffs that have accompanied the rapid adoption of AI automation tools. Companies have demonstrated a consistent willingness to shed entire workforces the moment a cheaper, faster alternative becomes available. In-game memos are meant to parallel an employee's experience of seeing the way the wind is blowing yet being powerless in the face of it. The project tries to put the user inside that experience, making them complicit in their own obsolescence by performing the very labor that trains their replacement. The central design question was whether a piece could meaningfully convey dread and futility through boredom; whether deliberately tedious interaction could be expressive rather than just frustrating. The retro terminal aesthetic, the compounding notices, and the final loss of control over the keyboard were all attempts to make that feeling land. The biggest takeaway was about integration: the emotional arc of the piece only works when the code, the visual design, the audio, and the physical booth setup all pull in the same direction. When any layer is out of sync, the effect collapses. Secondarily, I learned I like backend design a lot more than frontend design.