Democracy, along with capitalism, were the last projects to be started during the fiasco build. There was so much to do as the date of the art show approached that we decided it would be best to divide these last two political chairs between the two of us. The ideas and materials had been previously decided upon and all that remained was to build them. We framed it as a sort of competition to see who could make the better chair. Lyyli got democracy and I took on capitalism from an artistic point of view, I think we can safely say that Lyyli won this one.

Mimicking the ideal myth of democracy the chair is made from different colored and different kinds of fabric, all from different origins. To be a real democratic chair we figured it had not only to represent diversity but also contain a mechanism for improvement and addition. To represent this we placed a box underneath the chair amidst the fabric filled with more fabric strips both torn and untorn that can be added to the chair with some safety pins we supplied. We actually intended to expose a cruel joke here, we wanted to allow people to the opportunity to " mess up" the beautiful array we had so lovingly constructed. We figured some people would add with taste but that a good amount of people would just thoughtlessly add whatever. Our theory was that the cacophony of random and uncoordinated contributions would show itself to be inferior result to the concentrated and careful efforts of a few. The hope was that the chair would expand people¿s perception about the often unquestioned wisdom of the famous democratic system.

In our attempt to show the observers something about the shortcomings of mob wisdom it was us that received a lesson in democracy we were shown something instead. Although lots of people really loved the chair and even the idea behind it, not a single thread has ever been attached to it. People just don¿t care to vote on a chair that already looked nice, they probably wouldn¿t care to vote on a chair that looked ugly or mediocre either. People don¿t really give a damn what their chair looks like in general and the few people that do seemed happy with the seat the way it was. It has made us wonder what actually motivates or dissuades people from wanting to participate in the democratic process. We naturally assumed that people would want to be a part of our art project since we enjoyed it so much, but we were wrong, which means we have something to learn about our audience. Since we tend to value questions more than answers this is a wonderful result. The open source model of democracy doesn¿t really translate the way we imagined but that doesn¿t matter to us because there is, as always, something to be learned from everyone.