Sitting Chairs

This exhibit of chairs sitting on each other at the Design and the Elastic Mind caught my attention through its use of recursion in the design. The "levels" that the chairs stand at are representatives of layers of software in a digital world, from the point of view of a person whose world lies very much beyond the border from physical to digital.

Say, the largest chairs might have been virtual machines on an operating system (the white background), the next largest the window environments running on these VMs, and then the applications/utilities come, and there are also the utilities that don't need the window environment to run, etc.

Makes me think about imagining the computer as a social environment, having electrons interact and cause great turmoil in the apparently stable operation mechanisms (and doing this actually around two billion times in a second)... But let us not make things so cyclic that in the end, going deeper and deeper in computer science we won't arrive at social psychology or something similar.

One final note about the chairs: Notice the blockiness? I bet the legs and the body on each individual chair here can be divided into equally sized cubes with no volume left out...