In the increasing world of things where objects are no longer critically assessed based on just their aesthetic appearance and function, Cohen Van Balen address the politics of technology through the process of manufacture in their new project 75 WATT.
“A labourer over the course of an 8-hour day can sustain an average output of about 75 watts” (Marks’ Standard Handbook for Mechanical Engineers)
The project explores tensions between technology and biology at the scale of human body particular on the assembly line. They designed and made a product especially to be manufactured in China that has no function other than to create a choreography on the assembly line. The project is a dialogue with their earlier piece “Immortal” where instead of machines acting as a body by being connected to one another mimicking human organism, the process of mass manufacturing has appropriated the body to act as a machine.
What is the value of this artefact that only exists to support the performance of its own creation? And as the product dictates the movement, does it become the subject, rendering the worker the object?
The project is a collaboration with London based choreographer Alexander Whitley and all of the product’s components and dimensions have been designed to create a particular movement on the assembly line. The aim of the project is to reappropriate processes and systems of mass manufacturing to produce something that has no function other than to the people assembling it and explore notions of who is in the control, the labourers or the object.
We first got to hear about the project at the Resonate festival earlier this year where Revital and Tuur talked about the ideas driving the practice and shared most recent work. The video of their full talk is available below (40min) – highly recommended viewing (!).
If you would like to find out more about 75 WATT project, Tuur and Alexander Whitley will be talking about 75 Watt at Working Title Platform at workspacebrussels, 13+14 June. More information here.
Project Page | Cohen Van Balen
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This is probably the first article here, which raises my moral concerns. I’m not sure about this nice looking fab, in the era of the problems associated with the use of cheap labor.