Platform21 = Jamming report
Platform21 = Jamming report
No Tricks
Day eight - the final day of building
We’re projecting scenes from famous Hollywood films featuring breakfast machines in the round hall. Flubber, Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, Casper the Friendly Ghost, Wallace and Gromit – Yuri Suzuki has taken inspiration from all of them. The machines in the films might creak a bit here and there, but in general, the preparation of breakfast proceeds smoothly. Everything has been thought of, and between the various components frying the eggs, toasting the bread and spreading the jam, there are grasping mechanisms and robot arms to move the plates, the toast and the rest from one part to the next.
Only after a few days do you start to notice that these scenes, which at first struck us as relatively lo-fi, are full of special effects. On closer inspection, what looks like a totally automated robot arm actually turns out to be a piece of metal being moved from left to right behind the scenes. This makes it appear that no humans are involved.
But in reality, things are different. And when we make breakfast tomorrow and the next day, there will be no backstage area where we can help things along. Everything is visible; reality affords no space for special effects. So if it proves impossible within eight days of building to design a system for turning an omelette or automatically placing slices of toast in the jam-spreading trays, we’ll have to do it by hand. We find this rather charming: part machine, part human.
