Still

Two small circular metal plates on a wall, 1.50 m off the floor, far enough apart that no one person can touch both. Between them and a little higher, a projected video, paused.

Nothing happens until two visitors each take a plate and touch each other. The circuit closes through their bodies and the image comes out of pause — how fast it plays, and whether it runs forwards or backwards, depends on how they are holding the plates and holding each other. More people can join, making a human chain from one plate to the other, and the image answers all of it.

What plays changes over the days the work is installed: fifteen minutes of a forest whose leaves stir in the breeze once the visitors bring it to life, then a cheetah at full stretch, then a baby crying and being soothed, then a public-health film on how to avoid catching swine flu. All of it silent.

Still came out of FASE 5's theme, "Metaphors of survival". Thinking about what survival means now, about where human relationships stand in an age of screens, and about the growing fear of physical contact, the piece puts the important thing not in what is seen but in the interaction needed to see it: contact with strangers, in the age of hand sanitiser.

The title was chosen to hold all of its meanings at once — still as in yet, as in to quieten, as in motionless, as in calm.

Credits

• Author and maker: Sergio Sansosti
• The plates run to a 5 V circuit; an Arduino reads the strength of the signal and sends it over serial to the computer playing the video, written with openFrameworks
• FASE 5.0, "Metáforas de la supervivencia" — Sala 8, IUNA delegation, curator Silvia Maldini
• Centro Cultural Recoleta, Buenos Aires — 8–11 November 2013

Photos