The Factory, teamVOID, 2021
“The Factory” visualizes the modern production system by installing a factory as a sculpture. The work consists of a number of industrial robots and conveyors, and produces images generated from specific digital data as actual drawings. Each module is responsible for the unique drawing part and completes the drawing by sequentially performing tasks on the paper moving along the conveyor.
The idea started from the relationship between industry and art aiming to visualize the characteristic parts of modern industry. Manufacturing systems have been developed for optimization, and for this purpose, humans are excluded from the production process to minimize inefficiency caused by human factors. With the advancement of automated processes, it now seems that physical results are being produced from intangible materials such as data. Eventually, ownership of production is shifting from holding physical material to owning digital data. This transition seems to have an effect on art already, and NFT is a representative example. To reflect that, this work created a factory, a symbolic concept of the modern industrial system, which is automated with minimal human intervention and activated by digital data.
“The Factory” consists of six different modular processes. It initiates with some common digital data, such as time, weather, air quality and BTC prices. From that data, systems generate a serial number that will be used as the seed number to determine the drawing. After that, the data required for each module is calculated by the virtual process and transmitted to the physical system. At the final step, each process is performed along the conveyor to complete one drawing. Since this work is modularized, the configuration and size may be modified adopting the installation conditions.
