Unconventional Self

VR experience and furniture robotics | FREE EVENT
Theatre / Performance - Tue 19 April 2022
WORM Rotterdam
UBIK Space
Start → 12:00
End → 20:00

Werner van der Zwan & Charl Linssen are presenting an Unconventional Self, their latest kinetic installation.

Have you ever wondered what it is like to be a chair? Now is your chance to find out! During this event the artists combine their expertise in telepresence and furniture robotics to bring you a brand new technological experience. By using found objects, motors, microcontrollers and VR glasses, it is now possible to see and move through the world as an object.

Telepresence robotics allow a person to embody a remote robotic avatar. The person observes the environment from the perspective of the robot, which can move around under remote control. The remotely operated body mediates the relationship with the world, and if the experience is sufficiently compelling, a perspective shift occurs, where the person controlling the robot feels like the robot 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 telepresence robots, the bodies take unusual forms, being formed from old furniture, and controlled by windshield wiper motors. Movements and control inputs of the participant are translated to movements of the sculpture. The robotic object shows what the new body is through the resistance it gives to the actor trying to control it. For example, when one of the leg motors moves slightly, the object moves left, but at full potential, the object starts to move forward. By means of dialogue, the participant slowly develops a sense of this new body, and discover new possibilities and goals. Like the beetle in Kafka’s Metamorphosis, the human characters slowly start to become their new bodies, and will experience being part of the same private world as the inhuman characters around them, questioning the relationship between subject and object.

You want to know more about the artists and their process? Watch a process interview with the artists here.

This event is part of our programme #WunderPlatz X Skills & it is co – produced with V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media as part of the Winter Sessions art and technology residencies.

FREE ENTRANCE