A Slow Day is a 60-second meditation on the banality of contemporary surveillance, produced in response to the theme of Espionage.  Conceived from the vantage point of a cloud-based “digital agent,” the piece sifts through thirty minutes of real-world footage- pedestrians ambling across London’s Southbank Centre- and distils that half-hour into a relentless, almost meaningless stream of observation.

The work opens on a single wide shot: tourists, commuters, weave past one another beneath brutalist concrete.  A skeletal HUD blooms over the image-time-stamps, bounding boxes, confidence read-outs-signalling that an unseen system is watching. As heads are tracked, the animation spawns lines of metadata that feel both precise and irrelevant: Woman, grey, bored-looking. The text accumulates faster than the eye can parse it, forming a scrolling palimpsest of half-facts.  What should be actionable intelligence collapses into linguistic noise, exposing the surveillance apparatus as a compulsive note-taker trapped in its own feedback loop.

Each analytical flourish merely reiterates how little the system truly “knows.”  The bodies on screen remain anonymous silhouettes, their stories unreachable from a dataset that measures assumed knowledge. The soundtrack reinforces this futility: soft modem chirps and low-bit whirrs stutter beneath a steady, metronomic pulse, echoing machines idling while they wait for something of value to happen.

Thirty minutes is compressed into a terse minute, allowing the accumulation of “intel” to reach comedic density-an archive of non-events masquerading as classified material.

Conceptually, A Slow Day probes the paradox at the heart of ubiquitous monitoring: the greater our capacity to record, the less we may actually perceive.  By flooding the frame with superfluous data, the film foregrounds the spiritual emptiness of blanket reconnaissance-the way it flattens human complexity into sortable bits while yielding almost nothing about motive, emotion, or intent.  What remains is a portrait of espionage in its most common state: not high drama, but the quiet churn of systems watching, waiting, and finding little worth in the watch.