1st November, Bonington Gallery, Nottingham

Ann's site: www.the-chair.com

Ann's project description:

"The Chair is an exploration of the ideas process itself, how they're generated and developed. Ann Whitehurst and Paul Darke will host and film discussions with guests talking about: virtual reality, architecture, communications, robotics, environmental science, the club scene. From these they'll draw up plans, designs, theories for a techno-wheelchair, equipped for surveillance and assessment of society, culture, the environment. The discussions, designs and analysis of ideas will be constructed in real time on the website and projected in the gallery over the length of the residence"

"This is not, 'assistive technology' the concept usually used to connect disability and technology, with its emphasis on our perceived 'lack' but the complete opposite; it's a radical interpretation of the role disabled people can take in analysing and deconstructing the oppression of normality, particularly for those most burdened by it, the non-disabled. It shows how disabled people actually comment and shape society by their presence of difference".

Discussion Topics: Nanotechnologies - don't engineer, grow the chair... The chair is not a tool of the user... the chair is a collaborator. It should act more on its own volition than according to the needs of the sitter The chair should be able to collaborate with other chairs - it is open-source, continually developing and refining its own functionality and potential. The chair might like to stream audio and video in the future, but for now is happy with distributing text. Via an email-enabled mobile phone and internet mailing list, it can already provide a constant stream of data. With the data stream it would aim to create a community of chairs, users and friends. The tracking and locating ability of the cellular phone (maybe also GPS) is as interesting to the chair as its uses for communication. It would like to make a database of its journeys, making them replicable for other chairs. The data-stream carries the chair's own forms of representation, not human ones.