Decay -- the inevitable thing that unites us all. Abandon hope of anything else, and abandon your carnal form. Embrace the church of decay through assimilation. Observe with the rest of the crowd what happens in the future. After all -- you're next.

The church of decay is a church worshiping the inevitable fact of life: decay. To do this there are ritualistic displays of suffering & decay shown to the churchgoers.

Physically the church consist of multiple parts. The jars containing mold, solenoids from which carrots are hung above the mold, the audience looking at the carrots hung above the mold attached to the solenoids and the bible opened on the Book of Job.

The solenoids trigger one after another in a timed manner, acting as a form of clock further signifying the continuous nature of decay, always ticking away.

This piece was initially inspired by an earlier post titled "Job-bots" , which explored the theme of humans wondering about how to reconcile the existence of suffering in the world with the belief in a benevolent creator. This is what we intended to allude to by including a Bible propped open to the start of the Book of Job as part of our installation.

In a more secular sense, this conflict can be associated with the existentialist concept of the absurd: despite our inborn desire to find a meaning, the universe does not guarantee us any meaning in our lives. Instead, the only thing that is guaranteed is our eventual destruction.

Robots are usually enviably safe from the absurd: they do not seek meaning or endure suffering and, despite this, their existence is almost always imbued with meaning -- at least "meaning" in a teleological sense. In our project we, however, wanted to create a creature that had to share our own absurd state with us. Like us, the only thing guaranteed to the carrot creatures was eventual decay.

Some viewers initially misconstrued the scenario as one of us inflicting a sort of torture on the carrot creatures . However, what we created was simply an exposition of a carrot creature's natural trajectory. It's fate would have been the same whether inside or outside of the jar.

During our exposition, we fortunately managed to avoid any technical difficulties -- our project managed to run throughout the 2-hour expo without problems. In the future, however, we would make sure to use a taller pedestal, making the jars more visible and easier to observe. As we only used the tables, visitors had to crouch and kneel to read labels and watch the creature closely. Another point worth future consideration was the process of growing our own mold, which turned out to be surprisingly difficult. Ultimately, we had to use our creativity to "mask" some of the mold with paint, especially on the moving parts. 

The primary reaction of visitors who stopped at our stand was confusion (a combination of organic materials and ticking noises of solenoids), which also sparked curiosity and discussion. Through those discussions, we've gotten some very interesting views on decay and its purpose in life. Perhaps, it's a good thing?