HONORARY MENTION
The Robotic Chair
Raffaello D'Andrea, Max Dean
, Matt Donovan
The Robotic Chair
is an apparently practical and generic wooden chair with the unique
capacity to fall apart and put itself back together. This chair has the
familiar form of those used to furnish schoolrooms. Yet it is not like
any other chair. It is a chair with an obsession: it is perpetually
falling apart and getting back together. Behind the chair´s veneer of
wood is a custom robot designed to locate its other chair components
and reassemble itself. For no apparent reason the chair will fall apart
and crash to the floor. It then transforms into a robot and begins to
step off any parts it may have fallen on top of. Once clear, the robot
is able to drive about the floor in search of its parts. The chair sees
through an external camera and is able to locate its legs and back.
Once located it docks with its parts and secures them in place. When
all the components are attached the chair stands up and the cycle
begins again.
The Robotic Chair’s
obsession with falling apart and putting itself back together is an
insistence of its constancy, its coherence, its identity, and its
trust-worthiness, in a word, its object-hood. As a work of art, The Robotic Chair
expands the sense of real space and real time in which objects are
experienced. It reconciles technology and art before the viewers’ eyes.
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