Delay as Resistance

2025 — custom built textile instrument / mixed media

This piece explores time not as a fixed standard but as something lived, embodied, and unsettled. A small handheld device contains a motion sensor that translates every movement, acceleration, shaking, swaying, into sound through a granular synthesizer. Instead of a clock’s steady tick, time here becomes elastic. Gestures scatter and stretch sonic “grains,” while sudden shifts ripple through delay lines that fold the past back into the present. No two motions sound alike, making each moment singular and unrepeatable. The piece asks: what happens when time is not measured by hours or minutes, but by touch, weight, and rhythm of movement? In this way, it resists the uniform, standardized time of work and productivity; opening instead to a subjective, embodied temporality that cannot be controlled or repeated.

The device is encased in a fully organic, felted material, emphasizing slow, traditional crafting techniques over typical fast, metal-based electronics enclosures. Its prototype board features a stitched pattern, reflecting a dialogue between handcraft and digital fabrication. Inside, an ESP32 microcontroller reads data from an accelerometer module, including acceleration and jerk (the rate of change of acceleration). This data is parsed in Pure Data, passed through custom low-pass filters, and converted into MIDI messages that control delay and granular synthesis parameters, enabling dynamic, temporally “folded” navigation through audio samples.

× ❮ ❯