Tekt Industries Reflects on Workplace Safety with Interactive Art Installation

Physical and mental safety is a vital consideration for all workplaces. This week, WorkSafe and Tekt Industries built and installed a unique artwork at Southern Cross station in Melbourne’s CBD to raise awareness and spark conversations around this topic.

The installation, called Everyone Every Workplace, is constructed of eighteen 2.4m revolving mirrored columns arranged in a circle. Passers-by are drawn into the centre of this circle, and then surrounded by shifting reflections of themselves overlaid with visual and auditory messages about workplace safety. WorkSafe hopes this immersive experience will inspire reflection and conversations in the viewers’ own workplaces to improve everyone’s safety at work. The installation invites passers-by to make a pledge to this effect.

The written messages sit on the mirror itself rather than on a screen beside it, so a visitor reads each one across their own reflection. One column carries the line “The effects of bullying don’t end when work does” — a message about psychological injury, which is the half of workplace safety that a hard hat does not cover.

What visitors hear inside the circle is not written copy. The audio is the testimony of Victorians who have been injured at work — the same stories that first aired earlier in 2018 as part of WorkSafe’s Everyone, Every Workplace campaign. Standing in the middle of eighteen turning mirrors while those accounts play, a visitor watches their own reaction to them, which is the whole point of building the piece out of mirrors rather than screens.

“By listening to these stories and gauging their own responses, we hope that visitors to the installation will be moved to start the conversation in their own workplace about what is needed to keep themselves and others safe from injury,” said WorkSafe chief executive Clare Amies. “The stories are confronting because workplace injuries, be they physical or mental, are traumatic and can impact the lives of many people for a long time after they occur.”

The concept came from Airbag, the Melbourne production company that made the installation with McCann Melbourne and PPR for WorkSafe. Steven Nicholson brought it to Tekt.

Tekt engineered and built it from there. That covered the system design and the mechanical and robotic subsystems that drive the eighteen columns, the electronics and the software that control them, and the fabrication of every piece of the work. Tekt then constructed the work and carried out the original installation at Southern Cross station.

A piece like this sits between a film set and a machine. The columns have to turn reliably, in public and unattended, for six days straight, in a working railway station — and the deadline is an opening date that a station and a state-wide campaign are both already booked around.

The installation coincides with WorkSafe Health and Safety Month, a state-wide programme of presentations carrying the theme “A Safer Future for Everyone”.

The installation is open daily until Saturday 27 October, near the Collins and Spencer Street corner of Southern Cross station.

More information is available on the WorkSafe website and news page.