Project Description When we work, rest, or meet someone, we almost always sit in a chair. This familiar object is more than a piece of furniture—it shapes our bodies, our posture, and the rhythms of daily life. On a chair we focus, we wait, we drift. In doing so, the chair quietly inscribes invisible attitudes into our routines. Systematic Object – Chair is a kinetic performance in which six industrial robotic arms assemble and dismantle fragments of a chair. Each arm holds a component—two legs, two posts, a seat, and a backrest—and rearranges them over a four-to-five-minute sequence. The recomposed forms are drawn from iconic 20th-century designs such as Rietveld’s Military Chair, Le Corbusier’s LC1, and Breuer’s Cesca Chair. Yet through cycles of assembly and disassembly, the familiar silhouettes warp and their functions blur. The project approaches the chair not as a simple piece of furniture but as part of a system—and as something that allows the system itself to function. In the robots’ repetitive movements, function and form come apart, and the object exists as an ongoing process of transformation. Within this shift, we are invited to reconsider how technology, design, and the body intertwine in shaping the fabric of everyday life. Rietveld’s Military Chair (1923), Le Corbusier’s LC1 (1928), and Breuer’s Cesca Chair are landmark designs of the 20th century. Still produced and used today, they remain classics of modern furniture and symbols of universal design for industrialized society. About the Creator SystemDesign LAB is a project-based collective that experiments across technology, design, and contemporary art. Formed around professor Jae-hyuk Bae (team VOID), its members—Minkyu Shin, Yechan Choi, and Youngjun Cho—share expertise in kinetic installation, robotic systems, and object design. Through systems thinking and artistic inquiry, the group reimagines the relationships between objects, spaces, and movement. In this project, they ask how humans, objects, and infrastructures become intertwined within automated environments, rendering these entanglements visible.

Curator's Note The chair, a tool of everyday life, is not a neutral object but a structure of power—an emblem that has disciplined bodies and organized human life for centuries. Since the modern era, design movements such as the Bauhaus have used the chair as a testing ground, striving to realize the “good life” by balancing function and form. Yet today, our relationship to the chair can no longer be reduced to the act of sitting. Within digital work environments and algorithmically programmed routines, we already exist in a state of being ‘seated’. Systematic Object – Chair interrogates this condition by reassembling the collapsed materiality of modern objects and the engineered logics of capitalist society through a posthuman sculptural language. Systematic Object – Chair is a kinetic performance in which six robots repeatedly construct and dismantle a fragmented chair. Each industrial robotic arm holds one of six components—two legs, two posts, a seat, and a backrest—and follows a programmed sequence lasting four to five minutes, assembling and disassembling the parts in continuous variations. The fragments derive from historically significant designs: Gerrit Rietveld’s Military Chair (1923), Le Corbusier’s LC1 (1928), and Marcel Breuer’s Cesca Chair, each representing functionalism, minimalism, and the aesthetics of mass production. As the robots move, the pieces combine and separate organically, cycling between utility, form, and abstraction. Familiar silhouettes dissolve; functionality becomes ambiguous. In this process, the chair shifts from a structure meant for sitting to a processual structure—an object defined by ongoing transformation. What the audience encounters is not a static object to sit upon but a system, a thing in perpetual reconfiguration. Crucially, this processuality itself becomes a sculptural language. The repetitive mechanisms of assembly and disassembly do not seek completion of form but rather articulate the conditions of the system’s existence. As technology has moved to the center of industrial change, objects have become increasingly subdivided and systematized. The chair today is not only a physical structure but also a medium that regulates posture, labor, and time. To “sit” is less an act of rest than a placement of the body within a system, at a position and for a duration calibrated for productivity. The project visually explores how technology systematizes and abstracts objects, and how this reconfigures the human body, senses, and experience of time. Its core does not lie in technical precision or virtuosity. The robots appear to execute human instructions, yet their choreography produces a non-linear, unsettling sensibility that escapes control. The fragments of iconic design no longer carry function or symbolism but hover in suspension, endlessly recycled by the machines. Function loses meaning, form slips from its purpose, and technology generates new sensations of indeterminacy. Viewers find themselves confronted with a chair that cannot—or perhaps should not—be sat upon. This shift extends beyond the chair itself, inviting reflection on how all objects of consumption are subsumed into and abstracted by systemic logics. Systematic Object – Chair asks what remains of function and form when objects are continuously dismantled and rearranged within such loops. More than mechanical repetition, the performance visualizes the structures of power and control that accompany the act of sitting—structures so often overlooked. This channels back to the question: what have we been producing on the chair, and what have we relinquished there?