The project is in development and is linked to the wider ‘TEST’ studio project.
A sequence of short films forming a promotional film for a fictional technology expo, presenting impossible machines as credible products through demonstrations, close-ups, sales presentations, maintenance scenes, narration, graphics and sound.
The Expo imagines an alternative technological past in which fictional machines capable of prediction, divination and interpreting hidden patterns are demonstrated and sold as ordinary products. Drawing on the visual language of mid-to-late 20th-century scientific, surveillance and communications equipment, the project creates a plausible world in which impossible functions are treated as everyday technology.
FIRST TEST MACHINE — COINCIDENCE AMPLIFIER
The Coincidence Amplifier is the first example machine being developed for the project.
It acts as a test for the wider idea: how these fictional machines might look, operate, be demonstrated and presented within the Expo.
The machine accepts two apparently unrelated experiences:
FACT A
RED SHOES / TUESDAY
FACT B
BROKEN WATCH / SEASIDE
It analyses associations, patterns and significance before producing a definitive result:
NOT RANDOM
The machine does not calculate whether the events are statistically likely to be connected. Within the fictional world, it can determine whether the connection between them has actual significance.
CURRENT FILM TEST
A demonstrator introduces the machine, the two events are entered, and the Coincidence Amplifier progresses through a series of visual analyses — networks, graphs, waveforms, association fields and significance filters — before reaching its conclusion.
This first film is helping to establish the wider language of the project: characters, product demonstrations, machine graphics, sound, narration, sales presentation and technical explanation.
COINCIDENCE / PATTERN — RESEARCH
The Coincidence Amplifier also provides a way of exploring how apparently unrelated events acquire meaning.
APOPHENIA
The tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated or random events.
SYNCHRONICITY
Carl Jung’s idea of meaningful coincidence — events connected through significance rather than demonstrable cause.
PATTERN RECOGNITION
The human tendency to organise information and experience into patterns and relationships.
CONFIRMATION BIAS
The tendency to favour information that reinforces an existing interpretation or belief.
CLUSTERING / RANDOMNESS
Random events can produce apparent patterns even where no underlying connection exists.
BELIEF / INTERPRETATION
Coincidences may also be understood through intuition, fate, destiny, psychic connection or supernatural explanation.
The project does not attempt to resolve these different interpretations. Instead, it imagines a fictional technology that can provide an answer.
TOWARDS A SERIES OF MACHINES
The Coincidence Amplifier is intended as the starting point for a wider family of machines, each with a different impossible function.
Future machines could deal with prediction, divination, intuition, hidden patterns, memory, sincerity, unseen connections or other phenomena that cannot be conclusively measured in the real world.
Each machine can develop its own function, visual language, operator, demonstration and short film, gradually building the fictional Expo around them.
DEVELOPING THE EXPO
The longer-term aim is to bring these individual studies together into a larger promotional film and fictional exhibition environment.
The project can develop through film, performance, fabricated machines, graphics, sound, electronics, projection and interactive elements, with AI used as one additional medium rather than defining the project.
