An old-style Nokia phone remains still, constantly charging. It alternates between receiving phone calls and text messages without interruption, barely a pause between them. The urgent ringing and vibration are triggered simultaneously—an urgency that feels like an unpostponable summons.

Each time a character of a text message is received, the corresponding fluorescent light flickers. Those characters are composed of Chinese telegraph code and Morse code generated from the following text:

“The metropolis is not merely the module of capitalism or the extreme of urban-rural conflict. It also represents the massive emergence of both the living and the inanimate. It is a current that flows through networks of high-speed cables, satellites, and surveillance cameras, driving this world toward an accelerated demise. It takes away every person’s heavy physical body and, in turn, endows her with a frothy, foam-like body—light, yet indestructible.

To interrupt the metropolis’s perpetually urgent rhythm and sink into darkness, one must first become unseen. To be nothing is not a humiliation or an unrecognized tragedy. Quite the opposite—the later we are seen, the stronger our power becomes. Once we are seen, we have entered the countdown phase.”

The light flickers to the rhythm of the characters; the phone oscillates repeatedly between ringing and silence. Messages continue to pour in endlessly, yet no one ever answers.

This is not a communication failure, but a ritual: in the never-slowing torrent of the metropolis, before attempting to sink into darkness, one must first learn – to remain unseen.