Sitting with Jakarta
A sentient chair that has something to say about the city.
The question
If a chair could speak, what would living in Jakarta have taught it?
The problem / context
Furniture is the most overlooked thing we touch every day - we sit on chairs without ever considering them as witnesses. And a city as dense and contradictory as Jakarta is hard to talk about directly without flattening it.
The outcome / reflection
An installation built around a sentient chair: furniture given a point of view, asking visitors to literally sit with the city through an object that has quietly absorbed it. The chair becomes a way to feel Jakarta from an unexpected, patient vantage point.
// OVERVIEW
Sitting with Jakarta is the empathetic-object thesis as art. It takes the most domestic, ignored object and gives it sentience and memory, using that voice to hold up a mirror to the city it sits in.
// MAIN IDEA
The object as witness
A chair stays put while life happens on and around it. Giving it a voice turns that stillness into testimony - the chair speaks not as a gadget but as something that has been present, repeatedly, for the small human moments a city is actually made of.
// DESIGN PROCESS
Find the chair's perspective
Design the encounter
Tune the voice
// TECHNICAL DETAILS
Sentience layer
Installation integration
Interaction design
// MAKING
Fabrication
The chair was treated as both furniture and character, so the physical object and its voice read as one sentient thing in the gallery.
// BACKGROUND
Shown as an exhibition, it extends the anthropomorphism running through Babblin into the register of art and place.
// WHAT DID I LEARN?
Stillness, given a voice, becomes testimony.
An object can speak about a place more honestly than a person sometimes can.
Empathy with the inanimate is easiest to feel when you can sit with it.
// CREDITS
// WHAT’S NEXT
- Art
- Anthropomorphism
- Exhibition
- Sentient object