deployed in a former vermicelli factory once part of an industrial cluster along the brussels canal, the in-situ installation materializes the human-induced tipping point between the wheat seed — an encapsulated, multipotent, self-sustaining entity — and flour, fully disposable within the human trophic chain. it conveys the process of turning a complex system into a resource engaged in early capitalist production.
incarnating this past, a first entity is a conveyor moving incessantly from the interior of the space toward a window opening onto the canal, along a linear rail running the full length of the room. from its base emerges a stainless steel tube ending in a surgical-like claw carrying the second, soft, interacting entity.
the robotic form, recalling a basal form of life, is stripped down to its minimal operating structure, inviting cognitive projection through the emotivity of its kinematics. it moves according to a minimal algorithm that admits the placement of bodies in space as the only random variable of the system.
coming from fundamental research in robotics, the soft form has the physical ability to adapt to the contingencies of the surrounding space, making it ontologically capable of reconfiguring itself according to the alea of the milieu. conveyor_contentio is thus a transfigurational installation of a particular kinematic of robotics that inaugurated the field of continuum robotic.
questioning the normative expectations of precision and iterability of movement we usually have for robotic forms, the shape is convoked for the dissidence toward the taylorist paradigm it is involving.
emerging as a wordplay from the french term contention — the act of animal restraint under captivity, usually performed backstage — here the action is over-demonstrated, becoming an actual contentio.
the balancing movement of the device turns it into an instrument of de-incarnation, carrying the restrained form pathetically through the full length of the space. these two opposing entities compose a mechanism of control that requires our bodily engagement — we adapt to its oscillation, demands our physical involvement as spectators within this apparatus of control.
