Turkey’s contribution to the London Design Biennale featuring projects from over thirty countries, presents ‘The Wish Machine’, a project designed by Autoban.
The Wish Machine project takes direct inspiration from the “wish-tree”, a cultural tradition deeply rooted in the ancient Anatolian faith and found in ancient Greek, Kabala and Persian believes. It operates on a simple mechanism that involves affixing a note or a memento to a branch of a tree as an act of hope born out of hopelessness. The Wish Machine takes this multi-cultural tradition as the key insight into how design and utopia can cooperate.
The installation appears as an interactive pneumatic system operating in a mirrored space. Visitors are invited to walk through a tunnel made of transparent hexagonal tubes. They are invited to share their hopes and wishes, vision of utopias, and aspirations for the future, by writing them on paper, and feeding them to the Wish Machine through a lid.
Notes will then travel back through the tubes to a place out of visitors’ sight, as if their destination is a place unknown, a “utopia”. Just like throwing coins to the depths of a lake or lighting a candle to make a wish come true, the final destination will remain a mystery.
all images © Dilek Makinesi