The idea of a tree

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This machine creates just one object per day. It draws inspir­a­tion from trees, which grow and adapt in response to avail­able light. Powered by the sun, the machine starts work­ing at sunrise and stops at sunset. At a steady rhythm, it depos­its thread and a binder layer-by-layer around a core, form­ing a shape that will become a bench or a lamp. The size of the furniture varies with the season, and the outcome also reflects the day’s weather. When the sun shines brightly, the layers are thick and their colour is pale. A cloudy sky results in thin­ner, darker layers.

In our latit­udes, wood form­a­tion is seasonal, reveal­ing growth rings through their light colour­a­tion in spring and summer, and dark in autumn and winter. The idea of a tree trans­fers this phenomenon into a mech­an­ical device: an autonom­ous machine trans­lates the sun’s cycles into unique objects. Their length varies accord­ing to the seasons: the longest are produced in summer, the shortest in winter.

The machine is called Recorder One. Diurnal, it oper­ates with natural light, from sunrise to sunset. It wraps coloured threads soaked in binder around a matrix accord­ing to the light’s intens­ity. This process creates thick, light layers under bright sunlight, and thin, dark layers when the sky is over­cast. Each piece is a three-dimen­sional archive of a context, reflect­ing meteor­o­lo­gical changes: a mater­ial witness of the “here and now”. Recorder One thus broadens the discus­sion on origins and local produc­tion, tran­scend­ing crafts­man­ship and mater­ial to embrace a larger perspect­ive. The idea of a tree proposes furniture that is both cosmic and contex­tual, a true archive of a dialogue between geograph­ical data and mech­an­ical move­ment.