Wing chair, audio, Motorola 68hc11 microcontroller,
Macintosh computer. 1990/98.
Visitors to the exhibition see an ordinary armchair: no computers, speakers, or
tangle of wires. Once someone takes a seat, a hidden computer selects and plays spoken
phrases.
The piece's repertoire consists of about 150 digitized sentences, some being aphoristic,
others more everyday expressions of the purposes and significance of sitting.
I wrote some of these so that they build up an idea when played back in cohesive
groups, while others can stand alone and are selected at random in such a way that
they don't repeat until all these sentences had been played once. Thus, there is
control over what is going on conceptually at the same time that, for the visitor,
what happens is non-predictable and apparently non-repetitive.
The English sentences were all written by me; a German version of this piece exists
as well, in which I wrote the first versions of most of the texts. The latter were
improved and added to by Holger Schröder, a writer.The texts were spoken by
Donna Blagg, Dörte Junker, Jürgen Muthig, and Holger Schröder.
In 1998, I revised the programmed behavior of the piece and made its construction
more compact and robust, so that it is possible to ship it to a gallery, where the
setup then consists only of plugging it in.