[Clapping is an ongoing video archive and sound work that explores applause as a shared instinct and a learned ritual. It sits somewhere between performance, surveillance, participation and memory, a choreography of recognition and collective rhythm.
Across a year, I record short looping portraits of people I know or meet, each a 25 second gesture of clapping. Every new loop adds to the evolving grid, creating a shifting chorus of layered rhythms. The sound doesn’t grow louder, but it deepens as more and more gestures fold into one another, an expanding applause that absorbs each new participant.
Over time, this collection becomes a kind of living organism, a visual and sonic field that is constantly reorganising itself. Each viewing reshuffles the order, creating new combinations of movement and sound.
The final form of the work will take place as a gallery installation where visitors are invited to record their own 25 second video, which immediately joins the live stream. The projection grid will continually grow, month by month, and each return visit will reveal more participants and more layers within the chorus.
Clapping is both archive and performance, a networked applause that keeps changing shape as it is witnessed.]
For example:
“Clapping” is a growing archive of looping video portraits exploring applause as both an instinct and a learned ritual — a choreography of collective energy and recognition.
Each video loop is part of a larger sound architecture where gestures become a chorus, performed across time and place.