Searching for Contact

Searching for Contact is an installation of one thousand black silicon and copper cables, six kilometres of line in total, suspended from a single motorised disk. The disk spins, and the cables extend outward, held apart from one another by a programmed choreography that keeps them from entangling.

The biological self is absent. What remains is the gesture of reaching, and the lost connections hanging in its wake. Shono imagines a single signal shared by all living things, a unifying force that animates the body of the machine and draws the gaze upward in the manner of a dervish at prayer.

The work holds two states at once: a connective oneness in the shared force that moves every cable, and a complete physical severance from the one beside us. It is a peaceful plea for understanding, for acceptance of the other, issued by a body that cannot quite reach what it reaches for.