Full text of "UCLA daily Bruin"Bodegera Café is a nice and cozy restaurant-café that serves cupcakes and home-made cookies, delectable sweets and pastries, light snacks, coffee, soft beverages, and anything in between. A complimentary soup comes with every order. It is located at the ground floor of Homitori Davao - a dormitel for budget travelers and transients visiting or doing business in Davao City. The Café is conveniently located at the ground floor of Homitori Davao in the corners of Bangoy Street and Sta. Ana Avenue in Davao Chinatown, which can be accessed through a cemented alley between Mandarin Enterprises, and Golden Luck Agri Products along Bangoy Street. It is approximately 40 minutes away from the Davao International Airport, and is easily accessible by private and public transportation. Please visit the Dormitel's Facebook Fanpage Images courtesy of, and many thanks to Homitori Davao. TATA SUITE - THE GRAND PRESIDENTIAL Opulence and expanse fit for kings and Heads of State!
The Tata Suite at Taj Palace is apartment-sized, and showcases Mughal motifs, crystal chandeliers, curated objets d’arts, bespoke carpets and priceless paintings. EXPLORE OUR TATA SUITE GRAND PRESIDENTIAL 7,500 sq ft (604 sq m) Stately residence soaked with luxury, opulence & master art IN-ROOM SERVICES & AMENITIES WHY OUR GUESTS LOVE IT The bedroom is a superb space to relax and reconnect, with the bed and linen from Hasten, custom-designed acoustics from Bang & Olufsen, Murano mouth blown chandeliers crystal chandeliers… the works! The Tata Suite dons various avatars, and goes from being the perfect setting for a formal meeting to a casual space for family and friends. Savouring the fantastic view over a glass of good wine leads to interesting conversations. Both bedrooms have direct access to the suite’s private wellness facilities – a dedicated gym with state-of-the-art Technogym Kinesis equipment and a lavish JIVA spa treatment room with Hammam and Sauna facilities.
The sauna room is made by Tylo of Sweden. There are special tribal carpets used in the gym which are woven by nomadic tribes migrating between Turkman region and Persia. It useS raw wool silk, vegetable dyes, fine handspinning of yarn and goat wool Dining is a special experience here. The exquisite, specially curated menus are served with great flourish and personal touches... The 8-fixture bathroom has walls and floors finished in dramatic, bookmatched Gris Ferrari marble. Equipped with imported, designer fittings, His” and “hers” vanity counters flank a Kohler infinity-edge whirlpool tub for two, complete with chromatherapy functions. The foyer gives access to the study & library and to a dedicated 16-seat boardroom with full conferencing facilities. The private study is a state of the art office with high speed internet and a collection of the some of the finest titles ranging from Indian heritage, culture, music and art. Main study chair is imported from Poltaranu Frau.
Indian animal figures in white marble have been used in the conference room. The history of the “House of Tata” - is told through a collection of rare photographs picked from Tata Archives, Pune depicting the generations of one of India’s most influential and benevolent families The suite has ample space for an large family celebration in New Delhi. Walls adorned by M.F Hussain and other beautiful objets d’art give one a sense of connection with the city’s—and country’s—rich history.It doesn’t just fall over, it falls apart. And it falls apart with startling force; its legs fly out from under it, its back topples and rolls away, its seat crashes to the floor with a clatter and thud. But this chair is no Humpty-Dumpty. Once the scattered parts have settled and the noise from the crash quits ringing in your ears, it puts itself back together again. Enabled by a unique mechanical robot embedded in the seat of the chair, and a computer aided vision system suspended from the ceiling above, the chair locates its various parts and methodically re-assembles itself.
Robotic Chair was first conceived by Max Dean over twenty years ago in an artist residency at the Canadian National Museum of Science and Technology. Already well-known at that time for his challenging performance-based works, in the intervening years Dean has developed a substantial reputation for his interactive robotic works. Irrespective of form or medium, however, there are themes and relations that he returns to consistently. Characteristically, the spectator is central to the way the works are structured, the nexus around which to explore questions of exposure, trust and responsibility. Computer technology and robotics are, to a great extent, merely tools that the artist has used to construct situations where the spectator is required to act, to exercise a choice and, by doing so, become the performer of the work, becoming complicit in its processes and outcomes. An early, attention-grabbing performance is exemplary of what Dean is willing to risk. Blindfolded and bound, the artist is dragged feet-first by a winch rigged to suspend the body from a crossbeam.
Slowly the audience learns that they can control the action of the winch through the sound they generate. It is then up to the audience to determine their course, and whether the artist will be hung by his feet or not. What is at risk in Robotic Chair? In life, we fall apart and put ourselves back together again. If the chair is a representation of life’s process – of falling down, and picking yourself up; of falling apart, and putting yourself back together, over and over again – then the risk must be that fatal fall, a fall from which the robot can no longer reassemble itself. Dean routinely makes use of ordinary objects. Robotic Chair, for example, is modeled on a basic wooden school chair, sturdy and homely, something that an average viewer might find familiar and unremarkable. Earlier works have used or taken the guise of equally unassuming objects: a stool, a lectern, a table. But these objects are also invested with extraordinary properties. The table, for example, in the work called Table, will try to form a bond with an audience member, attaching itself to the chosen spectator as they move about the exhibition space.
The work imposes a certain self-consciousness on the chosen spectator as they choose whether to reciprocate the table’s attention, to play along with the work, or try to escape from unwelcome attention. And what about the spectator that is not chosen? The machine’s behavior is all the more unsettling by virtue of its mundane form. The chair, on the other hand, is unaware of spectators; it will perform in the absence of an audience, and in this sense it is a departure from the artist’s earlier work. It is then both “performing” in the mise-en scène of the exhibition, and “real” in the autonomy of its functionality and purposiveness. This duality collapses the difference between the spectacle of the “work” in the “exhibition” and the thing-in-itself. Hence, its potential for failure becomes its most compelling trait. Robotic Chair could easily stand as a metaphor for hope and the virtues of persistence. Hovering just below that uplifting surface, however, is our attraction to failure.
Central to either reading is this sense of performativity oscillating between the two poles of spectacle and autonomy. At one extreme is a type of machine pornography, wherein a basic human behavior has been objectified, (hypothetically) infinitely repeatable for our shock and amazement. At the other end is an act of imagination that stages the Robotic Chair as possessing both will and desire. From here it calls into question the moral and ethical repertoires that govern our investments in our technological extensions (to use McLuhan’s term), and it is in this dimension that we can look for the meaning of the work. Robotic Chair was realized in collaboration with engineer and systems architect Raffaello D’Andrea and industrial designer Matt Donovan. Robotic Chair has been presented at Yale University and the Yale School of Art (2008); ARCO (with Nicholas Metivier Gallery, 2007), Madrid; CMA Conference (with PacArt, 2007), Ottawa; Luminato – Toronto Festival of Arts and Creativity (2007);
Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto (2007); Children’s Museum (with Kitchener/Waterloo Art Gallery, 2007), Kitchener; a City, Toronto (2006); Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria (2006); and Private Viewing, New York City (2006). Max Dean is a performance, video and installation artist originally from Leeds, England. He has widely shown his solo and collaborative projects at such notable institutions as the National Gallery of Canada (2002); ZKM Centre for Art and Media, Karlsruh, Germany (2002); and at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma in Helsinki, Finland (2002). Previous group exhibitions also include the Plateau dell’umanita, Venice Biennial (2001); Voici, 100 years of contemporary art at Palais des Beaux-Arts (Bozar) in Brussels (2000); and dAPERTutto at the Venice Biennial (1999). Dean’s solo exhibitions include Snap, Susan Hobbs Gallery, Toronto (2004); Ottawa Art Gallery, Ottawa (2002); Mist, Susan Hobbs Gallery (2002); Any Moment, Susan Hobbs Gallery (2000). Raffaello D’Andrea is a professor of engineering and an entrepreneur.
His contributions range from the highly theoretical to the very applied, and incorporate mathematics, physics, computer science, technological innovations, and art. He was the faculty advisor and system architect of the Cornell Robot Soccer Team, four time world champions at the international RoboCup competition in Sweden, Australia, Italy, and Japan. He is also the system architect at Kiva Systems, a Boston area high-tech company he helped launch that has developed a revolutionary material handling system that utilizes hundreds of fully autonomous mobile robots. His work has been featured on Scientific American Frontiers and the Discovery Channel, at the Smithsonian, the Tech Museum of Innovation, and the Spoleto Festival. Matt Donovan is a graduate from the Ontario College of Art and Design and is working as an artist, industrial designer, and conservator of kinetic artworks. Trained in art but with an innate understanding of engineering, Donovan has built a career in which design and art are inseparable.