[In which I steal an entire blogpost from Networked Performance, a very useful blog detailing new works in brief. Some people steal whole posts routinely and call it reblogging. I’m not convinced that it’s cool but I’m doing it anyway right now.]

With this installation, Finnish artist Lotta Partanen wanted to study the possibilities of interaction between the physical presence of a human being and a rigid piece of furniture.

When we meet new people, it is sometimes hard to predict how they will turn out to be in the long run. Partanen has tried to replicate the same kind of behavior in an looking bench. As an unsuspecting person seats himself on the bench, an audio starts with the voice of a man telling about his life and the story goes on uninterrupted until the end, if the participant sits passively. But if the one seated moves or if the number of sitters varies, it reflects to the flow of the story and the man starts to become confused. The more activity there is in the use of the bench, the more the man’s story is in contradiction with itself.