SeatSale: License to Sit.

Download a Seating License to retract the seat's content-guard spikes

Here is the Internet Chair with magnetic stripe card reader and spikes that retract when a seating license is downloaded from a license server in response to input from the card reader incoroprated into the chair. The license server is in the 19 inch relay rack behind the Internet Chair.

The opening was Wednesday Feb. 7th, at the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI, 800 Chestnut St.), organized by Independent Curators International (ICI) of New York, and curated by Steve Dietz of walkerart.org (Walker Art Center) of Minneapolis. SeatSale was also exhibited at various other museums and galleries, such as Austin Museum of Art, Oklahoma City Museum of Art, etc..





Across from the internet chair (pictured at left) is a VGA television display on a TV stand (pictured at right), which displays the following message:





Swipe credit card or government issued photo ID card to download a FREE Seating License. Your card is for identification purposes only. The seating is FREE!!! By swiping your card, you agree to be bound by our Terms and Conditions. Your swipe indicates your agreement to these Terms and Conditions of use. If you do not agree to our Terms and Conditions, remain standing and do not swipe your card through the card reader!

________________________________________ Thank you for agreeing to our Terms and Conditions of use. ________________________________________

Enjoy Quality of Seating Services (TM) Middleware and QoS Provisioning.

then the following message is displayed while an extremely loud bank of 60 Hz warning buzzers is sounded throughout the exhibit space:

Your Seating License will expire in 4 seconds Please swipe your credit card or contact the SeatWorks to renew your license WARNING: Your Seating License will expire in 3 seconds! Please get off the chair! contact the SeatWorks to renew your license. License Expired

The poster is located directly behind the seat and relay rack housing the license server and licence manager, as shown below:



Here's a nice composite image of SeatSale and the poster:



You can also download a high resolution version of the above.

Here's a nice composite image of the poster and patent:



You can also download a high resolution version of the above.

See the patent:



You can download an mpeg movie of the seat from a user's point of view (approx. 20 megabytes), or you can download a closeup mpeg movie of a license being downloaded to the seat (approx. 2 megabytes). Another similar closeup movie is also available here (approx. 4 megabytes).

Here are a few video stills from the SeatSale surveillance cameras at Austin Museum of Art (amoa.org).

You can help by keeping a watchful eye on our infrared security cameras to help us prevent theft of Seating Services (TM), and to prevent the smuggling of contraband (pillows, boards, and other tools of license circumvention), into the museum space. This site is a mirror of the live video. The video is also archived. See a day in the life of a seat-for-license. (Longer movie: weekend seatsale.)

Sight License

Here is the cnet radio interview (encoded using oggenc; play using ogg123), but it's a huge file, almost 8 megabytes, because no time to sox down the original (even larger, almost 80 megabytes) wav file to mono, and since it's a phone interview, it really doesn't need 41k samples/sec.

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