DeusExMachina
A vending machine that sells nothing. You pay with a personal object, and watch a steel ball destroy it.
I — The workConcept
DeusExMachina is an installation that exhibits an alternative — an alternative economic structure and an alternative form of entertainment. The destruction vending machine sells an experience: visitors sacrifice a personal object in exchange for the exhilarating, slightly shameful sensation of watching their belonging broken to pieces by a falling steel wrecking ball.
In a world where objects have lost their value through sheer abundance, and where virtual thrills have dulled the senses, only a live, first-hand, participatory moment like this can restore a true emotional charge.
II — DocumentationPlates
III — The storyMaking & meaning
The work was made for an exhibition of contemporary design in a ceramics centre — a house of fragile, precious objects. We answered with a machine whose only product is breakage.
We were thinking about the emerging experience economy and its challenge to designers: to make fewer objects and more experiences. DeusExMachina takes the argument literally. It inverts the vending machine, the purest emblem of frictionless consumption, so that the visitor gives an object away and receives a feeling.
The exchange is deliberately uneven. To take part, a visitor must first decide what they are willing to lose, and that decision — private, sometimes sentimental, always a little absurd — is the real content of the work. The machine becomes an altar, and the title, the god from the machine, a description of what it asks of us.