If a technological object could organise a relationship, I would be interested in what it might perceive from what happens within that relationship.

An Instrument of Attention reimagines the polygraph, an instrument historically associated with surveillance and truth extraction, as a device of attentive listening. Rather than recording speech or attempting to determine whether someone is telling the truth, it attends to selected qualities of a conversation: rhythms, fluctuations, vocal intensity, frequency, pauses and hesitations. These signals are translated into the movements of a drawing instrument, leaving abstract lines on paper.

The distinction between recording and translating became important. The drawing does not preserve what was said, nor can it explain what a hesitation, change of rhythm or fluctuation meant to the people involved. A pause might indicate discomfort, concentration, distraction or nothing significant at all. The system cannot know this. It can only attend to what it has been given the capacity to sense.

What remains on the paper is therefore not a representation of the conversation as a whole, but a trace of relational presence: a material consequence of an encounter, filtered through the particular capacities and limitations of the instrument.

The card can still end up at the bottom of a bag. It can still be forgotten or thrown away. I cannot control what happens to it after we separate. But by then something has already happened that cannot be contained by the object itself. The person did not simply receive my introduction. They participated in making it.

This changed the way I understood what a tool could do. A tool does not only sit between an intention and its result. It can sit between bodies, changing what they are able to do with and in response to one another.