Science fiction is filled with cherished seats of power, workstations that put the universe a finger-touch or a mere thought away. Darth Vader had his meditation pod, the Engineers of Prometheus had their womb-like control stations, and Captain Kirk has the Captain's Chair. But no real-life workstation has quite measured up to these fictional seats of power in the way that Martin Carpentier's Emperor workstations have.
Seat of power - African Decisions
With a retractable monitor stand that can support up to five monitors three inch and two inch , a reclining seat with thigh rest, a Bose sound system, and Italian leather upholstery, the Emperor LX looks more like a futuristic vehicle than a workstation. In , Carpentier was slaving away as a web designer when he reached a breaking point. He was tired of his tangle of cables, the struggle to manage multiple monitors, and the horrible ergonomics that came with a standard computer desk.
Inspired by the emperor scorpion, Carpentier modeled his workstation after its tail, with the monitors suspended at the stinger.
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The Emperor is finished with a glossy auto paint. It pumps the workspace atmosphere through a HEPA air purifier, and is equipped with built-in audio and lighting—all controlled from an embedded Windows system via a inch touch screen. The Emperor is the Maserati of computer desks, and it comes with a Maserati price tag: The original Emperor, the Equipped with adjustable height, recline and lumbar support, an adjustable overhead monitor support "tail," and a seat heating and cooling "climate package," the frame of the is hand-built from PVC, aluminum and steel and comes in any color the customer wants.
But its arrival on the market was ill-timed. So I went back to the drawing board and I designed the Introduced in , the is a bit more utilitarian. It has a look more like a weapons system than a luxury car, with sand-textured powder paint in "Carbon Black" and "Mac White" , an all-steel frame, and a microfiber covered seat.
It lacks the inch touch-screen control panel of the , substituting stainless steel switches for seat tilting, monitor arm control, and lighting. As with so many of the other inland groups of west Africa, the Chokwe were ravaged by slavers working in the Atlantic slave trade until its abolition in the s. Relations normalized thereafter as the Chokwe became suppliers of ivory, rubber and wax for Portugal, but the tension never truly dissipated.
What the Chokwe did take from their interactions with westerners was their designs—not the least of which was from the chairs the Portuguese brought with them. Like many other Sub-Saharan groups, the Chokwe had previously used low wooden stools, often decorated with caryatids, for seating. The European style chairs were seen as a marked improvement and were quickly adopted by the tribal chiefs who could afford to commission them from wood carvers. The earliest chairs tended to be more stylistically similar imitations of those used by the Portuguese. They were often carved from single pieces of wood and were small relative to their European counterparts which were roughly the same size as the stools the Chokwe had used previously.
It was not long though before the renowned craftsmen of the Chokwe picked up on the technique of socketing crossbars used by the Portuguese. With this technology, the individual pieces of the chair could be smaller, allowing for the overall size of the chair to match those used by Europeans. This appropriation of technology makes the Chokwe one of the few exceptions to the general rule that Sub-Saharan woodcarving is made from a single piece of wood.
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These chairs are affixed with iron nails, but the brass nails used on many of the other examples of Chokwe chairs would have been as rare as gold. The iconography of the Chokwe chairs began evolving as soon as the first chairs were created. This can range from the minor alterations seen on the taller of the two chairs, to the immensely decorated examples housed in other museum collections.
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They also served as prestige objects, which would show others the importance of the owner. The iconography of these chairs tends to speak to the aspirations and daily sights of a chief, and the importance of the individual figures depicted rises hierarchically as they approach the top of the chair. Typical figures resting atop the rungs of ngundja were generally engaged in some activity of daily Chokwe life: Guardian caryatids may support the seat as chair legs.
The backs of the chair tend to be unique combinations of geometric designs composed of individual designs which each bear names. At the middle-top of this chair back is the crux of the chair. Considering his seated figure on the right support rung of the squatter chair, it is likely that all of the figures seen on this chair are ancestral, making the chair a unique counterexample to the general hierarchical structures of the chairs. Text and images may be under copyright. Please contact Collection Department for permission to use.