1440

There are 1440 buttons that the robot presses, each one illuminating as it's pressed as the robot works methodically around a metaphorical clock face.

Like a metronome, its action is carried out in perfect time yet with millimetre accuracy as its broad armature sweeps by.

There is a parable here about productivity, mechanization and the looming 4th industrial revolution, whereby the machines will either steal our jobs or perhaps liberate humanity to pursue more pleasure, and seek more joy — or will the machines of our making serve only to boost productivity further, towards a never reached goal of infinite growth on a finite planet. The promise of more playtime has never materialized not since the predictions of Marx: arguing that technology would help free workers from harsh labour and lead to a "reduction to working time" to Bertrand Russell who in the 1930's wrote of the benefits of "a little more idleness" and the economist John Maynard Keynes who predicted that automation could enable a shorter working week of less than 15 hours. Automation still issues this promise, and yet we find ourselves mired in working more more more.

Mechanical manumission to finally lie flat — or self flagellation via 996?

The buttons the robot pushes are arrayed in a phyllotaxis pattern, described by the Fibonacci sequence this formula appears everywhere in nature — yet here is rendered in cold hard steel in deliberate opposition.