Buffer State
Common Index x DolceXoXo
Medium
Interactive installation
Role
Creative technologist @Common Index
Year
2026
Deliverables
An interactive artwork for the collective exhibition DolceXoXo
© T-Space Studio, 2026
Buffer State is an interactive installation by Common Index that explores how we relate to time and space through our presence in a shared environment. Sixteen cameras capture the room from different viewpoints, feeding a system that holds, delays, and distorts its images. As visitors move through the installation, fragments of their recent past overlap with the present, creating a space that continuously falls out of sync with itself.
Developed for DolceXoXo, the collective exhibition powered by Nike SNKRS in Milan, the project takes its starting point from the early-2000s references surrounding the Air Max Dolce and the idea of a design arriving ahead of its time. We approached this temporal mismatch as a question: what does it mean to inhabit a place when what we see no longer corresponds to where, or when, we are?
© T-Space Studio, 2026
To explore this, we brought together sixteen cameras, combining low-resolution webcams from the 2000s with contemporary SDI cameras. The old webcams were no longer supported by the Windows and macOS systems we were using, but remained fully functional on Linux (<3). Bringing these devices back into use allowed different generations of image-making technology to coexist within the same system, each contributing its own resolution and visual texture to the representation of the room.
A buffer temporarily holds incoming data. In Buffer State, this becomes a way of holding onto the present, allowing images to linger as the room moves on. Through buffering, displacement, and visual feedback, the camera feeds bring different moments and perspectives into contact. The room becomes both the source of the images and the place where their relationship to physical reality begins to slip. Visitors encounter themselves and one another as fragments within a shifting visual memory.
What made the installation work was the presence of people. In an empty, static room, the difference between a live image and a delayed one became difficult to perceive. Movement made that difference visible: a gesture, a change of position, someone crossing the space gave the system something to displace in time. The experience emerged through the relationship between what people were doing and what the installation returned to them.
© Aria Ruffini, 2026
For us, Buffer State became an experiment in how this disorientation could be shared. Each visitor contributed to an environment that others were also inhabiting and changing, without any one person determining its final form. Its most interesting quality emerged from this dependency: the room needed to be lived in for its sense of time and space to come apart.
Press
Nike ha presentato la nuova Air Max Dolce con giovani creativi
L’arte ai piedi: le Air Max diventano protagoniste di una mostra
Nike Air Max Dolce: un nuovo linguaggio per Air Max
Dolce XOXO powered by SNKRS
Nike presenta le Air Max Dolce
DOLCE XOXO: 12 HOURS OF ART, MUSIC AND INTERNET CULTURE IN MILAN
