Incoming — a live kinetic artwork exposing the constant stream of reported combat incidents occurring around the world.
War is relentless… for those at the center of it. For the rest of us, it often appears as a headline passing through our feeds here and there.
“Incoming” is an artwork that tries to make that relentlessness visible — presenting a live stream of reported combat incidents from around the world.
The work is currently streaming live from my studio, where each new report arrives and becomes another message in a growing physical record of conflict.
The goal isn’t to explain any particular conflict or take a side. Sometimes it’s worth simply stepping back and taking in the sheer volume of what humans are doing to each other.
Many will inevitably ask about the data. The current feed draws from publicly reported incidents gathered from news sources and other documented reporting around the world. Like any system built on reporting, it is imperfect — incomplete, delayed, sometimes contradictory, and at times simply wrong. And of course many incidents never get reported at all.
In other words, even this constant stream is only a fragment of what’s actually happening.
There is work underway to expand and improve the data sources over time, but it felt more important to put the piece out into the world sooner rather than waiting for perfect information — especially given the state of the world.
My hope is that the piece makes the scale of it all just a little harder to ignore. Not just the individual events, but the rhythm of them — one after another, day after day.
May we all find a way toward sending fewer of these messages.
— BREAKFAST