I grew up in an analog world. I'm raising a child in an algorithmic one. Field Readings I begins in the distance between those two realities.

The work begins from a proposition: that we are living through a technological rupture whose consequences may prove as profound as those of the Industrial Revolution—not simply in the tools we use, but in how we experience time, attention, and one another. We are among the last generations to carry a lived memory of a predominantly analog world. This is not nostalgia for what came before, but an attempt to register the passage itself while both systems still coexist.

The work does not illustrate this condition so much as perform it, using repetition, accumulation, interruption, and return as a living system.

A rotary telephone moves at the speed of a hand. A drummer works inside time, stretching and compressing it through rhythm and silence. Both make duration physical, even as each belongs to a larger system of transmission, pattern, and repetition.

In Field Readings I, journalist Bill Whitaker repeatedly answers rotary telephones inside a stark white room with no visible boundaries. Elsewhere, drummer Ryan Sawyer improvises alone. The two never meet. Beneath every ring, movement, and breath runs a persistent electrical hum—a low mechanical presence that never fully disappears.

What begins in restraint accumulates. Calls recur. Gestures repeat. Rhythms multiply. Sound thickens. Attention compresses. The space gathers pressure, breaks, falls quiet, and begins again.

The work inhabits a threshold between analog and algorithmic systems, bodily and computational time, presence and acceleration. Neither world appears in isolation. The old persists inside the new as the new reorganizes the conditions around it.

The stillness that follows is not an ending. It is the brief interval in which the body measures what has changed before the system begins again.