Photography by Ortrun Bargholz.
Clemens Schöll is a German media artist, theorist, and software engineer based in Berlin. His work focuses on the impact of technologies – especially automation – on our highly mediatised society. He traces systemic and structural connections to make them tangible, offering possibilities for transformative visualisation and participation through his art practice. Inspired by everyday experiences, Schöll seeks to penetrate systems, explore their cultural and technological origins, and highlight their impact.
Free as Coffee (2024) is an interactive installation featuring an automatic coffee maker, LED signs, instructions, prints, a coffee plant, and a 17-minute video.
In this installation, coffee metaphorically embodies both — a site and a device — to explore the impact of automation and our agency in (ref)using it. At its centre is a visually exploded, fully automated coffee machine — the first commercially successful consumer model, released in 1985 — aptly named Superautomatica by the Italian brand Saeco.
The instructions are simple: make yourself a coffee, sit down, watch the video, and take a coffee break. The machine presentation — sculptural on a plinth — references old-school explosion drawings, still available for the Superautomatica, created in a time when technical documentation was accessible and repairing household goods was common.
Photography by Ortrun Bargholz.
This transparency of the machine’s inner workings highlights the importance of access and readability of knowledge in giving people agency in a world of increasingly complex and detached systems.
The video begins as a stereotypical YouTube tutorial. After the machine is introduced, it is taken apart, explained, and repaired, while the narrator traces the history of coffee, coffee machines, and the ubiquitous coffee break — why, and for whose benefit, are you taking a coffee break?
Over time, the discarded coffee grounds from the Superautomatica accumulate into a pile staining the pristine exhibition environment, revealing both the excess and the often overlooked material- and labour-intensive foundations of automated processes.