The Treachery of Chairs

Haewon Jeon

April 4th, 2023 4:41 min read 1289 words

There are one and three chairs.1 All three may be chairs or not chairs according to the following principles. ① They do not present the concept of sameness, and they are not each other’s substitute or alternative. ② They have been abstracted into discourse or illustration. ③ Each embodies a history of chairs – what we perceive of as chairs: it began with a solid, then evolved into a line without a plane, and a plane without depth. A recent treachery has been committed against the three chairs, by abstracting said chairs into content material. Here we have the fourth chair: made of free falling dots without a solid.

The ontology of the fourth chair has no desire for stability, rather it embodies the transparent superficiality and temporality of computation. The three chairs dissolve into bits and pixels. The fourth chair is the coordinate of indeterminate data in the gaps between the discourse and the illustration, in a world of magical replicas, and perhaps in Schrödinger’s box. The treachery of the contemporary chair is illuminated by projection through our screens. What appears on the screen is not a shadow of reality, but a comprehensive ghost of pixel debris, or a mixture of codes produced by technologies. This is the raw material of the fourth chair, which goes beyond the history of reproduction and arrives at the world of indecipherable lines and planes. We may need rendering to understand the framework of the new chair and its analogies.


Pre-Tutorial 1
Which of the following can be called a chair?

①❮iframe src= “https://3dwarehouse.sketchup.com/embed/e867b487-4107-491e-add6-598f24fc2141?token=aWYNv99V2DE=&binaryName=s21” frameborder=”0” scrolling=”no” marginheight=”0” marginwidth=”0” width=”580” height=”326” allowfullscreen❯ ❮/iframe❯

②

③ Model Info 

Materials: 3 
Polygons: 62,736 
File Size: 5MB 
Modified Date: 26/OCT/2016 
Layers: 1 
Unit of Measure: metre 
Bounds: 496 x 510 x 800 
Distance: 508.5


Only the machine-readable system can see the fourth chair. It accurately measures possible data. Programmed commands detach noise from signals, then the skeleton of the chair is analysed by the system. The data and codes write the line, and the line forms the plane with bits and pixels. This decoding process evokes the imaginary ground wherein the data becomes a visible chair. It is clearly a contemporary reproduction of how machine structures re-source, e.g. the fourth chair.

However, the chair does not dream of existing merely as a resource in our upcoming age. It has already started to transition into being re-objectified. Therefore, my next question is: can the fourth chair be reproduced as an object? If so, how can we read the object without a material basis?

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