A Gadget Designed To Make Assembly Workers Dance
In 75 Watt, a project by
Cohen Van Balen, a mass-produced object has no other purpose than to
choreograph its own assembly.
"A laborer over the course of
an 8-hour day can sustain an average output of 75 watts."
That fascinating quote is from Marks’
Standard Handbook for Mechanical Engineers. Something of a bible to
mechanical engineers, it’s easy to interpret that line morbidly. After all, we
live in an era in which most of our gadgets are made on assembly lines, where
human beings are treated like nothing more than crude batteries made of flesh
and bone.
But as anyone who has ever seen
purple filaments lick their hand when touching a plasma globe knows, the
generation of electricity can be a beautiful thing--a strange, hypnotic dance
with a rhythm all its own. Why can’t this same thing be true for the
electricity generated by humans working an assembly line?
That’s the idea behind 75 Watt,
a new project by London-based studio Cohen Van Balen. It’s like a plasma globe
dropped over Foxconn.
Cohen Van Balen is made up of Tuur
Van Balen and Revital Cohen, two designers who have long shown a fascination in
the tension between biology and technology (previous projects include a pigeon
that could manufacture soap through defecation, and a series of organ
replacement machines that have been networked together to form a
semi-biological circuit). With 75 Watt, though, the duo wanted to
examine a different sort of tension: this time in the context of
mass-manufacturing.
In 75 Watt, workers on a
nondescript Far East assembly line are shown assembling an existential
MacGuffin of a gadget: a nonsensical object that does absolutely nothing. But
that is not to say it is purposeless.
"The only function of the
object being built is to choreograph its own assembly," Van Balen tells
Co.Design. "All of its dimensions, components, and materials are designed
to create specific movements when they are put together."
In a sense, then, the movement of
the assembly workers is the product being built. As each line worker in 75
Watt picks up the gadget being constructed and does their small part in
piecing it together, their precise, repetitive, and fragmented motions become
an intricate, electrically charged dance.
75 Watt was shot on location in a Thermopot factory in China over
the course of three days, with 15 actual line workers appearing in the finished
film. Finding a suitable location was by and large the most difficult aspect of
putting together the project.
"Because of the logic of
mass-manufacturing, every minute on an assembly line is worth a lot of money,
and we didn’t have the budget to compensate factories for this," remembers
Van Balen. "In the end, we were lucky to find a culturally minded factory
manager, who we were lucky to convince after some Chinese business/dinner
rituals."
Although it might be tempting to see
75 Watt as an indictment of modern mass-manufacturing, Van Balen says
that was not the intent. "Why would I be qualified to indict
mass-production facilities, or consumer culture for that matter, when I’m as
much a part of the problem as anyone else?"
We are all connected to the objects
that come out of factories, no matter what side of the assembly line we are on.
What 75 Watt seems to show, however, is that that the product that
unites us in the middle--whether an iPhone, a Thermopot, or a nonsensical
MacGuffin--is something that we have all decided to choreograph our lives around,
and this is a choreography that can be strange and beautiful indeed.
http://www.fastcodesign.com/1672993/a-gadget-designed-to-make-assembly-workers-dance#1
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