Intention of the work:
The intention of this work is to bring attention to the climate crisis, specifically criticizing the lack of responsiveness that many people have. Within any of our lifetimes, millions of acres of land will be underwater, including parts of New York City and dozens of other major cities. The piece is meant to mark how, eventually, we may be floating on loungers atop buoys in areas that are currently okay – just as lax as we have been as this crisis progresses.
Alternative expression:
Personally, I resonate more with kinetic and/or interactive works of art. This piece is strong and makes an obvious, but nevertheless, powerful statement, but I would love to deploy soft technologies in order to make the piece dynamic. One potential concept would be initially having the lawnchair on normal “land” (like the background of the public installations) and slowly submerging the land, revealing the buoys, and adding rhythmic motion to the piece.
Technical Paper
I found a technical paper which explores a new design of fluid-inflatable actuators. It discusses how, often, the applications of fluid-filled actuators are limited due to the time it takes to actually fill them because of various properties of liquids. The new design(s) proposed in the paper have two distinct configurations, rather than a continuous slow inflation. This idea could be applied to the design in order to make the cycle of the piece more instantly repeatable, as well as provide a place for the water to be held before the chair is submerged.
Sources
Gorissen B, Melancon D, Vasios N, Torbati M, Bertoldi K. Inflatable soft jumper inspired by shell snapping. Sci Robot. 2020 May 20;5(42):eabb1967. doi: 10.1126/scirobotics.abb1967. PMID: 33022625.
Jenny Kendler. Lounging Through the Flood. URL: https://jennykendler.com/section/483111-Lounging%20Through%20the%20Flood.html (visited on 2023-02-5).