In 36,000 Ways — IDFA DocLab 2025 Version

Inside a small, darkened booth suspended with hundreds of shrapnels collected from frontline sites in Ukraine, a single visitor at a time encounters the installation. In front of them, a lone fragment rests on a narrow wooden shelf, illuminated from above. When the visitor lifts the shrapnel, the experience begins. A sensing technology—originally developed for surveillance, target detection, motion tracking, and through-wall monitoring—quietly detects subtle physiological signals in real time. These signals, particularly the heartbeat, modulate a low-frequency soundscape, turning the visitor’s own bodily rhythms into the emotional engine of the piece.

Surrounded by fragments engineered to explode outward at over 1,000 m/s, the visitor becomes the only living body inside a suspended field of potential violence. Their pulse becomes the fragile counter-force to an object designed to kill, collapsing the distance between observer and event. The shrapnel in their hand shifts from inert debris to a charged interface—an artifact built for harm that now responds to the presence of the one holding it.

By moving away from visual media and toward a sensory, introspective encounter with material evidence, this first manifestation becomes both prototype and standalone experience. It lays the conceptual groundwork for the forthcoming full-scale “frozen explosion”: a six-by-seven-meter volumetric constellation of thousands of shrapnels through which a single visitor will walk, their physiological presence again shaping the soundscape from within.