CADENCE
Blinks is an ongoing cartographic and video archive of flickering lights and technical glitches found in public space. Each record combines a moving image with its geographic coordinates and, when available, the cadence of its flicker. Together, these fragments form a map of “accidental lighthouses”: signals produced by malfunction rather than design, guiding no one anywhere. Since 2019, the archive has reached archive no. , with records from countries.
If you come across a flickering light and would like to contribute to the archive, send a video together with its coordinates—or an approximate location—to santiagocolombomigliorero@gmail.com.
“I guess the flicker
(Carlos Gardel and Antonio Le Pera, 1935)
of the lights in the distance
marking my return.”
“We don’t make mistakes, we have happy accidents.”
(Bob Ross, 1984)
Blinks is an ongoing video and cartographic archive of technical failures in public lighting systems. It documents lights that, instead of remaining steady, begin to flicker due to malfunction. Each occurrence is filmed, geolocated and added to an expanding archive of accidental rhythms found in public space.
The project approaches these lights as unintended lighthouses. Their technical failure interrupts an expected function and produces another behavior. Like conventional lighthouses, they emit recognizable sequences of light and darkness; unlike them, they offer no direction. Their rhythms emerge from error rather than design.
Each light is analyzed through its particular cadence, translating its flicker into a sequence of on and off intervals. This process echoes the identifying patterns of maritime lighthouses, while producing a growing collection of binary rhythms derived from malfunctioning urban infrastructure.
Through this archive, Blinks explores error, rhythm, utility and obsolescence by attending to small, often unnoticed events within the urban landscape. Technical failure appears here not simply as the end of an object’s function, but as the moment in which another behavior—and with it another possible meaning—emerges.