Charl Linssen / Werner van der Zwan
Meta.Morf 2024 – [up]Loaded Bodies / Trøndelag Senter for Samtidskunst / April 17 – June 9 /
Curators: Zane Cerpina, Boris Debackere, Espen Gangvik, Florian Weigl.
Unconventional Self (2023)
Have you ever wondered what it is like to be a chair? Now is your chance to find out! By combining their expertise in telepresence and furniture robots, the artists tried to answer this question in this exploratory experience. By animating found objects with electronics, it is now possible to see and move through the world as a chair.
Telepresence robotics allow a person to embody a remote robotic avatar. The person observes the environment from the robot’s perspective, which can move around under remote control. The remotely operated body mediates the relationship with the world. If the experience is sufficiently compelling, a perspective shift occurs, where the person controlling the robot feels like the robot’s body is their body, and they are perceiving and acting in the world from the robot’s point-of-view: they feel “embodied” in the sculpture.
In our version of the telepresence robot, one embodies a folding chair. Participants develop a sense of this new body, discovering new possibilities, vulnerabilities, and desires. Like the beetle in Kafka’s Metamorphosis, the human characters slowly start to become their new bodies and experience being part of the same private world as the inhuman characters around them. This project was co-produced by V2_ Lab for Unstable Media. The choreographic text was written in collaboration with Marta Wörmer.
Werner van der Zwan (NL) is a Dutch artist living and working in Rotterdam. In his artistic practice, he investigates how a sense of life can be created in the non-living. By animating found objects and giving them a lifeworld, he tries to question the dichotomy between subject and object. He does this by morphing the objects into moving bodies using electromotors. In performances and installations, stray objects are given a last breath, expressing their distinct character.
Charl Linssen (NL) is particularly interested in computer simulation of dynamical processes, which unfold over time. The brain is such a dynamic system and is moreover involved in continuous feedback with its environment, mediated by the body through perception and action. In his spare time, Charl uses electronics and robotics to build objects that exhibit a similar kind of responsiveness to their environment. These objects have a quality of “animatedness,” or being endowed with a spirit, in the sense that they are not just objects like any other but come to life once the circuit is powered on.
Header Graphics: “A Bestiary of the Anthropocene” by disnovation.org.