EREMA

A tribute to the feeding machine in Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times.

168cm * 32cm * 22cm

Barbed wire shelf, motor, red-lined light, audio, computer, a blinking surveillance camera model, a speed-controllable compositing part of a Leonian machine.

Inspired by the film In Time, where the currency is measured by time, the currency in the city of Leonia is bound to the amount of emotion citizens expressed in front of the machine. EREMA, scattered all around the city, is used to receive a dataset of different kinds of emotions and distribute money accordingly. The more intense the emotions, the more money people will get out of it. The machine depends on human labor, randomly displays emotion-provoking photos in a never-ending loop, detects people’s facial expressions, then calculates the corresponding money. The emotion data will also be sent to a Leonia relic (a compositing part of a Leonian machine), changing its pumping speed. By presenting photos that will induce fear, confusion, and different types of phobias, EREMA tries to understand the deepest roots of human nature, pursuing a future where they are not only intelligent but also sentient.