Oriel Factory
Exhibition in Oriel Mostyn, Newtown, Powys UK, 2011.
Press release:
In Oriel Factory, Granjon presents a radical new take on production lines. Using yesterday’s electronic kit – defunct computers, CD / DVD players, radios and speakers – as the raw material, Granjon has commandeered an army of volunteers – the ‘Oriel Factory workers’ – to help him break apart these mountains of ‘dead tech’. These are then redesigned and re-constructed as programmed artefacts for the gallery, with the help of digital fabrication tools such as a 3D printer.
The Gallery is transformed into a busy hive of industry, where disembowelled computers and printers are reborn as the robotic prototypes of tomorrow. In the midst of this feverish activity a family of robots roams the galleries: a home robot, the Big Bootlaoder and several smaller Thingy robots trundle backwards and forwards, stopping only when their energy reserves run down. Their power supply is a ‘forest’ of battery feeding stations connected to renewable energy sources – solar panels on the Gallery’s roof and old bicycles recycled as human-powered dynamos.