Balance From Within by Jacob Tonski
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Balance comes from within. It’s a delicate act, and sometimes we fall down. A 170 year old sofa balances precariously on one leg, continuously teetering, responding internally to external forces. A meditation on the nature of human relations, and the things we build to support them.
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“Balance comes from within. It’s a delicate act, and sometimes we fall down.” In Jacob Tonski’s Balance from Within (2010-2013), a 170-year-old sofa balances precariously on one leg, continuously teetering, responding internally to external forces. Within the body of the sofa, a robotic assembly maintains balance dynamically. As the sofa begins to fall, the mechanism senses tilting and exerts a force appropriate to counter the falling, resulting in an endless wobbling back and forth. The piece is a meditation on the nature of human relations, and the things we build to support them.

Jacob Tonski is a pragmatic optimist whose work explores dynamic balance through kinetic metaphors.

A self-adjusting platform makes everyone the same height, probing ideas of equality and the origins of power. A larger-than-life top spins about the room, wobbling through themes of pleasure, danger, youth and decay. A sofa teeters, standing on one leg, musing on the stability of the social structures we build. Videos disorient and lighten the body and mind.

These and other human-scale objects, both amusing and threatening, find an uncanny identity between toys and tools. The forces of time and gravity serve in these works as foils for those things we are powerless to direct in our lives, and with which we must instead dance and negotiate.

Tonski holds an MFA from the Design | Media Arts department at UCLA. He studied computer science at Brown University and worked as a Technical Director at Pixar Animation Studios. He has spoken at the Haystack Mountain School of Craft and The School for Poetic Computation. Recipient of an Ars Electronica 2014 Award of Distinction, he was awarded a 2013 Sustainable Arts Foundation grant and was a 2010 fellow at the Carnegie Mellon University Studio for Creative Inquiry.

He is currently an assistant professor of Art and Interactive Media Studies at Miami University, Ohio, and in 2015 will be joining the faculty of the Art and Technology Studies Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His creative work has been exhibited in China, in Brazil, and throughout Europe and the United States.

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