HARDSTOP? is an interactive audiovisual installation that interrogates our relationships with autonomous machines through a "stillness-to-stillness" model of interaction. When a visitor stands still before the automatic loom — a metaphor for autonomous machines — the otherwise ceaseless loom falls still in return.

The automatic loom is often remembered as an ancestor of the computer. But one Japanese lineage took a different path over a century ago. The loom company that grew into TOYOTA built automatic looms that sense their own abnormalities and stop themselves, releasing workers from monitoring machines all day long.

Yet with the rise of agentic AI and other autonomous systems, watching over machines has taken on new importance — returning us to the very role we were once freed from.

HARDSTOP? overlays this emerging relationship of human-machine monitoring onto an early history of loom monitoring and its release. The installation uses a camera and pose-detection model (MediaPipe Pose) to read the visitor's stillness. Twelve threads are driven by motors rotating to twelve sine waves tuned to a just-intonation scale — rooted in physical law, widely used before humans conceived artificial scaling systems for their convenience. Each peak and trough triggers a tone tied to its wave. When a human is detected, the loom slows; when the stillness lasts, it stops.

In this work, an abnormality that triggers a machine's stoppage is human stillness. In an age when machines may no longer obey, what we need might be the composure to face them and reconsider what we are becoming together.