GODOT
‘An urban still-life on loneliness and time‘.

Godot places a quiet corner of domestic life—an armchair, a side table, a phone, a lamp—into the open air.

Each object holds a voice: real words from real people, gathered in the slower seasons of life. Grief. Waiting. Repetition. Memory.

Nothing happens unless someone stops.
Step onto the rug, and the nearest voice comes into focus.
Step away, and it fades back into the city’s hum.

Godot invites you to slow down—just long enough to feel the rhythm of someone else’s life.
It’s not interactive. It’s not performative. It’s a shared pause, if you choose to take it.

Concept

Godot explores temporal friction—the subtle tension between bodies that slow, and environments that do not. As we age, or move through extended periods of illness, solitude, or grief, time begins to stretch. Movement slows. The world, meanwhile, keeps its tempo. That gap—the speed differential between internal and external time—is often where loneliness gathers.

Godot brings this into public view. A familiar domestic scene—armchair, side-table, landline phone, tasseled lamp—sits in the middle of an urban environment. Inside each object, real voices are embedded. These aren’t performances. They’re fragments from interviews with people in the later stages of life. Small details. Long pauses. Dial tones. Breath. Waiting.

The installation isn’t interactive in the usual sense. It doesn’t respond to control—it responds to presence. You don’t activate it. You join it.

Interaction Logics

Godot is designed around one quiet threshold: the choice to stop.

Threshold of Intention
The rug functions as a simple sensor. It only activates sound when someone steps fully onto it. Half-steps don’t count. Pausing matters.
Furniture as Archive
Speakers are embedded in the furniture—cushions, lamp, drawer. Each object "remembers" a voice, a moment, a weight.
Temporal Synchrony
The lamp pulses at 0.9 Hz—the frequency of a resting heartbeat. The body subtly entrains. Empathy, if it happens, arrives through pacing.

There is no central control panel. No instructions. Just a simple architecture that asks: Will you slow down long enough to hear someone else’s time?

Design Logics

Every part of Godot is shaped to create a physiological and emotional shift through pace.

Furniture as Archive
Each piece holds a voice. The armchair remembers rest. The lamp remembers breath. The table holds the dial tone. Speakers are embedded not symmetrically, but clustered—like memory: uneven, textured, partial.

Sound as Atmosphere
Voices are always present, but indistinct—hovering like distant thought. As you approach, the closest voice gains resolution, not just volume. Frequencies clarify. Competing signals fall away. It’s not louder—it’s clearer. A kind of acoustic intimacy.

Temporal Entrainment
The lamp pulses subtly at 0.9 Hz, the pace of a resting heart. Over time, the nervous system synchronises. Stillness becomes shared—not taught, but felt.

The installation becomes a soft, porous membrane between private and public time.

Purpose

Godot isn’t a spectacle. It doesn’t dramatise ageing. It doesn’t frame slowness as a tragedy.

It offers an encounter. A moment of shared tempo.
A chance to feel the shape of time when it’s no longer hurried.

By staging a domestic fragment so publicly, Godot invites the city to overhear what it normally misses.
Not with pity, but with presence.
Not to explain, but to re-tune.

To feel someone else’s time is to momentarily loosen your own.
Godot gives you that choice.