Still Loading

Still Loading

Still Loading transforms digital waiting into a space for contemplation.

Still Loading is an installation built around an evolving collection of loading animations endlessly looping across a series of screens. Usually designed to briefly occupy our attention while digital content loads, these familiar interface elements are extracted from their functional context and turned into the subject of the work itself.

Omnipresent yet almost invisible, loading animations have become part of the unconscious visual language of contemporary life. Designed to soften waiting time and maintain the illusion of immediacy, they reflect a society shaped by permanent connectivity, accelerated information flows and an increasing intolerance to delay.

In Still Loading, these micro-animations are trapped inside an endless present. Nothing ever fully appears, resolves or completes. Suspended in a perpetual state of transition, the installation transforms waiting into a contemplative experience while exposing the visual mechanisms through which technology manages attention, expectation and frustration.

Fragments of vanitas iconography - skulls, candles, hourglasses, watches, coins or globes - emerge throughout the piece. Borrowed from classical painting and reinterpreted through the aesthetics of digital culture and video games, these symbols connect historical representations of mortality and impermanence with the visual codes of contemporary interfaces.

Oscillating between irony and meditation, Still Loading can be perceived as a contemporary vanitas: a reflection on time, attention and the fragile promise of technological immediacy.

The installation was presented at Maison de la Culture de Tournai, Belgium, in 2024.