B R E A K F L O W

BreakFlow is a device that links a digital payment to a physical action. A user remotely triggers a blow delivered by a machine onto a fragment of the real, a plaster cast, ghost of everyday packaging. Selected debris are gathered into a labeled pouch, bearing the names of everyone who contributed to the destruction of that fragment. The pouch stays at the installation.

The system operates through a visible chain of operations: payment, processing, execution, recording. Each blow is tied to a pseudonym, a reference, and a simultaneous inscription in the database, the video and the matter. Together they form a coherent network of correspondences, where each action appears attested, verifiable.

This traceability does not aim to prove, but to stabilize.

Each payment corresponds to an identifiable event, yet the conditions of that event remain variable. The intensity of destruction evolves: the number of blows required to destroy a fragment fluctuates. The more the system is activated, the more it resists. A single fragment may involve one participant or forty. The price per blow is fixed. The outcome for the participant does not change, but the benefit increases. What is produced is not a strict equivalence between gesture and result, but a continuity between different forms of trace.

The user does not acquire an object. They enter a process.

The material fragment acts as a recording surface, a secondary support of a primary operation: that of inscription. The work articulates several regimes, digital, visual and physical without privileging any of them.

The project reinvests its revenue into its own development. What the machine earns, it puts toward its own extension.

This is not a device about destruction, but about the construction of belief.

A belief produced through repetition, coherence and the persistence of traces. A belief that does not rest on illusion, but on a protocol.