Hila Shemer
Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Israel
Pythia: The Confession Robot
Pythia is a theologian robot, offering to ease the wait of guilt that one may carry. Pythia was developed as a part of my research at the Spatial Performance and Design Interdisciplinary Studio of the Architectural Association (AA school of architecture) in London, 2017-8. Pythia, puts in to question the way we have become used to receiving and perceiving forgiveness from a figure on behalf of the Gods, challenging the role of a mediator by replacing it with a robot.
When the wooden lid is rested vertically on top of the box, the project calls upon audience to interact with the box, inviting it to a confession. During the confession, the box also functioned as a recording device which constantly records, without the viewer’s knowledge, all the sounds and visuals from the private session. 90 seconds into the confession, the box will surprisingly start to play the recorded track and visuals, making the confessors listen and observe their own confessions. This, shifting the audience from the role of the guilty-confessor to the moral-judge, giving them the opportunity to offer forgiveness to themselves.
Overall, Pythia is more than a box, but it is an interactive installation. All coming from the thin screen; the recording, projection and track-playing had the powerful ability to occupy the hole space around it.
Pythia’s design takes inspiration from traditional wooden- carved confession screens; a semi-sheer “skin-façade”, yet was made using contemporary digital tools such as laser cutting. This creative process is based in the will strike a balance between the traditional and the avant-garde.
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Hila Shemer is a Tel-Aviv and London based practicing architect and artist, as well as an architecture critic publishing over 200 articles thus far, both online on Xnet (an Israeli on-line magazine about Architecture and Design) yet also writing for various print-magazines, including the renowned UK-based ICON.
Shemer is an M.A. graduate with distinction of the Architectural Association in London (2018), and holds a B.Arch. from Bezalel academy in Jerusalem (2010). For the past 8 years, she has been teaching architecture at various institutes including Bezalel; first as an assistant professor, then as a lecturer in a 3rd a 5th year housing-research studio. At the AA Shemer is a tutor of a creative writing workshop at the Interprofessional Studio (AAIS) MA and MFA program.