Instead of sending old refrigerators to a scrapyard, Dutch artist Dirk van der Kooij ingeniously recycles and reuses the materials to create a chair made of one ‘endless’ piece of plastic string.
The ‘Endless’ chair is crafted by a robot that Van der Kooij has specially created for this purpose. The process begins with old refrigerators, which are ground then melted and processed by the robot. Since each fridge used is a different colour, every resulting chair is totally unique.
Van der Kooij says he had always struggled with small, complicated moulds, so he wanted to find a production process that could allow him to adapt and change designs without moulds.
‘I adopted a retired robot,’ he says. ‘With this robot I can build a chair out of one plastic string and refine it endlessly. The colors can be determined by adding different pigments.’
He says the robot took about a year to rebuilt and serve its new function – building a chair of one interrupted line of string.
Watch the making of the chair film on Frame Mag.
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