Selfie Automaton 2.81

SELFIE AUTOMATON
A famous archive image from 1977 shows president Nicolae Ceausescu inspecting a vast model of the future Bucharest, from a sliding bridge, giving advise to a team of architects responsible for the making of it.
Meanwhile, the political environment has changed, but the metaphor persists and implies a question of positioning. Are decisions still being taken from a sliding bridge (them)? And are we, as individuals, through our particular actions and social relations, on or under that bridge?
It is first of all this question of positioning that the exhibition attempts to raise, through a set of mechanical automata. The visitor is invited to temporarily switch roles, from the passive and contemplative, to a participative one, of putting an installation – an automaton - in motion.
The automata, constructed of sets of stereotypical characters are, on another level, placing the visitor in various spatial relations, from the one of the distant observer (at the “round dance”) to part of a row (in the “banquet”) or in opposite sides (in the “committee”), inviting to introspection, and questioning our role in the social mechanism.
Automata, machines that perform a range of functions according to a predetermined set of coded instructions, are known in history as rather entertainment objects for the rich.
Using this form as a tool, the project proposes a critical form of entertainment show, an alternative selfie, in an apparently predetermined, but editable background.