Conservation of Intimacy is a series of interconnected wooden machinery and latex pneumatic “tambours” inspired by the 19th century physiological experiments of Etienne Jules Marey. It consists of a substantial tower with a bench for two people at its base, video surveillance of a hidden reaction, and a bicycle-powered paper feed with recording pens mounted on an adjacent wall.

The movements of people on the bench activate the pneumatic tambours, which make hidden balls roll about. A truncated view of the balls motion can be watched on a B&W surveillance monitor. The video balls seem to float up into the air in a slow-motion dance in response to the couple’s dance on the bench.

The couple’s dance also works tambours that power pens writing on a stream of paper flowing down the wall. The pens register the nuances of the bench movements – you can discriminate the languid motions of cooperation from the sharper ones of competition. The trace is similar to an ECG or a seismograph – we might call it an intimato-graph.

A third participant rides a stationary bicycle feeding paper in a slow motion cascade down the wall, past the pens, eventually forming a pool of paper on the floor. Sideways movement of the bench blows air into the ear of the biker, connecting them all in a cooperative game.

Conservation of Intimacy suggests a law of nature akin to the conservation of mass or the conservation of energy. If there are discoverable laws that govern our social world, intimacy might well be fundamental in that realm and there is only so much of it to go around.