Machines for believing in was the first part of an ongoing research project that concerns our taught perceptions and commonly held beliefs.

They are a set of films and machines that carry out actions we are discouraged from doing with story telling and consequence. The machines give evidence to their user’s perception; either to provide confirmation or contradictory evidence.

I wanted to abandon all previous knowledge in an attempt to understand what happens when we do certain things we’re told not to do; designing robots and performances that carry out these actions. First putting a knife in a toaster, I went onto flicking the light switches, cutting live cable, I hit a screw driver into a plug socket, and dropped a hair dryer in the bath. These machines aimed to question actions that were currently unproven. These prototypes went onto inform both the Lightswitchflicker & Hairdryerdropper.

Dropping a Hair dryer in the bath & The toaster’s test subject/dummy