Accidental Stop

Accidental Stop Detector is a public art project in the form of a constructed situation. It is a device intentionally installed inside a regional train and connected to the train’s public announcement system. Operating autonomously, the device can detect unintended stops between stations and retrospectively announce them as planned artistic interventions. As an homage to the practices of the Situationist International and Marcel Duchamp's “ready-mades”, the project takes a step forward, reflecting on the highly automated nature of the contemporary world where carefully crafted sensory-advised algorithms make decisions independently from the human-perceived state of the world, often taking advantage of humans’ perplexity, confusion, and slow reaction.