Max Dean has been engaging audiences with his performance artwork since the late 1970’s. Concerned primarily with ideas of control, Dean himself was often the central feature of his early works, putting himself in precarious situations at the mercy of his audience. Complex technology increasingly became part of his later work as he continued to explore this topic.
"The Robotic Chair" (Max Dean, Raffaello D'Andrea, Matt Donovan) in the short film Robotic Chair by Peter Lynch.
In 1999 Dean began to actively develop on an artwork he had conceived of a decade earlier: a robotic table that would seek out an individual viewer and attempt to establish a relationship with that person by communicating solely through movement. The artwork, called “The Table”, turned the usual viewer-object relationship on its head, with the viewer becoming as much the object of the performance as the table itself. Cleary Dean was asking the viewer ‘who’s in charge?’ and who better to collaborate with than an authority in control systems?
To help him realize his project, Dean sought out the expertise of Raffaello D’Andrea, then assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Cornell University, and the leader behind Cornell’s championship robotic soccer team.
In 2001, the pair unveiled “The Table” at the Venice Biennale, where according to art critic Robert Enright in a recent issue of Border Crossings, the most telling encounter comes from a pair of women who display mixed reactions to the table’s movements:
When one of them puts her hand on the table, it abruptly moves away.
“I don’t think it likes to be touched,” she says. Then her friend places her hand on the table in what comes close to a caress and the edgy piece of furniture doesn’t move.
The response of the first woman is heartbreaking, the lament of anyone who has been jilted in love: “Oh, maybe it’s just me,” she whispers.
Of course machines - even very sophisticated ones such as “The Table” - do not have ‘likes’ or ‘dislikes’. Intricate mathematical equations form the basis of the highly complex behavior that so convincingly conveys the human-like ‘personality’ of the artwork. And it is this ability of “The Table” — to morph so fluidly in viewers’ minds between the human-like and the machine-like — that contributed to its success at the Venice Biennale and, later, at the National Gallery of Canada (where it is now part of the institution’s permanent collection).
Following the success of “The Table” Dean and D’Andrea decided to collaborate once again, this time with artist and industrial designer Matt Donovan, on a second artwork entitled “The Robotic Chair”.
"The Table" at the 2001 Venice Biennale. Max Dean, Raffaello D'Andrea.
At its first performance at the ideaCity conference in Toronto, the seemingly unobtrusive chair awed its viewers as it collapsed dramatically onstage and, with the help of sophisticated algorithms and robotic components, went about collecting its various parts. And then, to viewers’ delight, it slowly stood itself upright once again.
Audience members at a “The Robotic Chair” performance often remark that watching the chair right itself is like watching a calf trying to stand for the first time: one does it with bated breath. And it is the idea that mathematics and algorithms can bring viewers delight, and can capture their imagination, that draws D’Andrea into his collaborations with Dean.
“The Robotic Chair” won the acclaim of cyberart sophisticates at the 2006 ARS Electronica conference in Linz, Austria, delighted children and adults alike at the Luminato Festival in Toronto, Canada, and has been the subject of a short film by documentary director Peter Lynch.
Robotic Chair – mehr als Kunst
The Robotic Chair
Warehouse Robots
The Certainty of Machines: An Interview with Max Dean
