[photo: Matt Donovan]

Every now and then you miss a project of significant substance that was hatched in your own backyard. I've been doing quite a bit of research on dynamic self-assembling systems recently and yesterday I stumbled across a fantastic 'performative furniture' project entitled Robotic Chair (1984-2006). Before I say a single word more about the work, please watch the video documentation below.

Robotic Chair is a sublime mediation on eternal recurrence, conducted in the medium of furniture. The project has grown out of a lengthy collaboration between Max Dean, Raffaello D'Andrea and Matt Donovan and was originally conceived by Dean during a 1985 residency at the National Museum of Science and Technology in Ottawa. The above video (by documentarian Peter Lynch) frames the scene perfectly: a lone chair sits on stage and suffers spontaneous structural failure, strewing parts all over the place. After a few moments of silence, the seat/chassis whirs to life, does a three-point turn to align itself with one of the displaced legs and the chair begins the process of reassembling itself. The chassis contains 14 motors, wheels and a wireless receiver and each of the joints is crafted to facilitate efficient re-connection. To aid in realignment and reconstruction, the chair utilizes a computer vision system that analyzes video from an overhead camera tracking the orientation of the various pieces. However, all this engineering is for naught – just as soon as the chair (improbably) battles back to an upright position, it collapses.

Robotic Chair is unsettling because it calls into question several fields of inquiry. Are we to approach this uncanny object as furniture or kinetic architecture? To what degree is the chair self-aware? Most importantly, why does this struggling object evoke our empathy? Much of the tension in this piece is derived from the lack of a human body and given our close connection with the chair—an object we can physically occupy—we are invested in the performance. Robotic Chair is the opposite of dispassionate furniture, it is existential theatre. Who needs Beckett? I want one of these chairs for my studio.

Robotic Chair was awarded an honorary mention in the interactive art category at the 2006 Prix Ars Electronica and the project was recently added to the permanent collection at the National Gallery of Canada. The manner in which the piece forces the viewer to examine their base understanding of the chair as an object brings to mind Joseph Kosuth's 1965 conceptual art project One and Three Chairs (pictured above). That comparison is a bit tenuous though as Kosuth's "chair study" engenders a more passive, cerebral examination of language and representation. Robotic Chair is visceral and in floundering onstage it foregrounds that we're on the cusp of a world filled with (semi) sentient objects. Who knows, in a decade or two you may come home one evening and discover that your table is drunk. The $64,000 question: will you reprimand it or will you let it sleep it off?