Nearness

Nearness is a one-minute film made at BERG as part of the Touch project, with Jack Schulze and Matt Webb. It is a homage to Fischli and Weiss’s Der Lauf der Dinge (The Way Things Go, 1987), and an answer to a small question we kept asking ourselves about RFID. With this technology, nearness triggers the event. Things don’t have to touch. They have to come close.

Nearness, BERG, 2009. One minute, one second.

The film stages a chain reaction across a tabletop full of mechanisms. A pendulum swings, a wheel turns, a phone vibrates and tips a balance arm, a paperclip falls, another phone wakes; the action passes from object to object across an intricate stage of brass, aluminium, perspex stands and small grey-painted blocks. What looks like physical contact between the components is in fact triggered by RFID. Each junction in the cascade is a near-field interaction, where one object passes information to another without touching it. The mechanism completes the gesture; the field initiates it.

A wide shot of the Nearness rig: a tabletop scene of acrylic stands, grey painted blocks, blue circles on rods, two old Nokia phones in the centre, an articulated arm with brass weights, a paperclip jumble, and slender wires connecting components. Soft daylight. The composition reads as the kind of intricate kinetic stage a chain reaction could run across. — The full rig. The two phones at centre are Nokia handsets with NFC; the blue circles are RFID readers; the articulated arm is a balance with brass counterweights.

It was a homage in form as much as in feeling. Fischli and Weiss spent months preparing the cascade in Der Lauf der Dinge; we spent ours preparing this one. The point of their film is the patience and the stage-craft, the way each step has been thought through and rehearsed and bound to the next. The point of ours is the same, with one substitution: each step happens through proximity rather than contact. The mechanism is the same; the trigger is invisible.

A close-up of one of the small mechanisms in the rig: a precise brass-and-aluminium balance arm pivoting on a white plastic wheel, with two cylindrical brass weights on a threaded shaft. The arm extends out of frame at top right and supports a small black disc bottom right. Behind, a grey block on an acrylic stand and a wire dropping from a second block. — One of the balance arms in detail. The brass weights are threaded onto a shaft so the throw can be tuned.

What we wanted the film to do, more than anything, was foreground the moment when nothing visible is happening but something has nevertheless changed. RFID interactions are exactly that: the card is held near the reader, the field does its work, and nothing on the surface is different. The film puts that moment in among the visible, audible, mechanical, physically satisfying ones, and lets it sit there as a peer.

Production

Made at BERG (London), 2009. Direction by Jack Schulze, Matt Webb and Timo Arnall. The rig was built in the studio over several weeks. Mechanisms were turned and assembled by hand. Phones used in the cascade were Nokia handsets with NFC reader chips. Long-take filming with multiple resets; almost no post-production. Part of the Touch research project at AHO.

Selected coverage

Nearness was selected for MoMA’s Talk to Me exhibition (24 July to 7 November 2011), curated by Paola Antonelli, alongside four other works of mine: Immaterials: Ghost in the Field, Media Surfaces, The Journey, and Suwappu. The original BERG and nearfield.org launch posts (linked above) carry more detail. Adam Greenfield‘s On Immaterials essay (Speedbird, October 2009) sits in close conversation with the film and the wider Touch work.

Nearness was made at BERG (London) by Timo Arnall, Jack Schulze and Matt Webb, as part of the Touch research project at AHO Oslo. With thanks to the BERG studio and to everyone who helped reset the rig.