Type & Fade: A Mechanical Performance of Writing, Temporality, and Erasure

Abstract

“It types. It vanishes.” In an age saturated with information, every word is born already teetering on the edge of disappearance. This installation stages a slow, deliberate performance of expression and erasure. A line of synchronized servo motors brings a vintage typewriter to life, striking each key with mechanical precision—as if resisting the speed of the digital world, insisting on presence. But permanence is an illusion. Before the ink has time to settle into the fibers of the paper, a silent shredder hums below, ready to consume the freshly printed page. The words emerge only to be erased. They are spoken, but never quite heard. Remembered, but only in passing. This is not merely a machine. It is a temporal interface. A choreography of disappearance. A metaphor for the present moment—where expression and extinction arrive hand in hand, and every attempt at permanence becomes part of the cycle of forgetting.