Comfort Xxl - The comforting machine

Jennifer Baumeister has recorded as many different video clips as possible, featuring men, women and children with diverse origins and life styles, old and young speaking their own comforting words. Selected clips are accessible through the machine, which looks like a slot machine or a cash point. The audience is able to press a button, selecting a woman, man or child and a randomly chosen clip is shown. The user can repeat this procedure indefinitely.
Comfort XxL is not only a machine that comforts people, it is also supposed to show how different people comfort in individual ways, the range of 'comforting styles' people have. The experiences and character of the comforter are revealed in every comforting word they say.

Nowadays there are machines for everything. Why shouldn't there be a comforting machine, where everybody can get their private portion of comfort?! Anonymous and stress free like taking money out of a cash machine! Comfort XxL doesn't only give the audience a glimpse into the emotional world of strangers, yet it confronts every user with the topic "comfort". Apparently it makes a lot of people think about their own idea of comfort.

Jennifer Baumeister began working on the Comfort XxL machine in January 2004. Interviewing a wide range of people including; other artists, social workers, employees of Berlin's public transport system,clerics, a therapist, alcoholics, students, a Karate instructor, a cook, a manager, school pupils, children, homeless people and a vox pop of passers-by to create the diversity represented by the 'talking heads' which appear on screen offering the viewer comfort. Once the building of the machine was complete Baumeister approached over sixty different institutions with a view to having them house the machine on their premises for a limited amount of time which resulted in arrangements being made with seven organisations. As a result the 'Comfort XxL' travelled around Berlin between August and October of 2004. Thereafter the artist visited Pécs (H) and created a new version of the machine, with another 100 Hungarian comfort clips which toured around Hungary and Slovakia (supported by the Robert Bosch Stiftung, the foreign affairs office of the Bundesrepublik Deutschland and the Lenau Haus).

Now Baumeister is travelling through the UK and Ireland to collect English comforters to build an English version of Comfort XxL.

In the future Baumeister intends to construct a multi-lingual version of the machine to be exhibited internationally dawning attention to the ever present need for human warmth, encouragement and comfort in a climate of increasing globalisation.

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