TAFTAA – SIGNAL (SPIN AN EMPTY VESSEL, THIS IS FINE) (2025) is a newly commissioned neon piece by Chloé Delarue, designed for the façade of Istituto Svizzero. The work is part of TAFAA (Toward A Fully Automated Appearance), an ongoing body of research examining how automation, digital systems, and technological infrastructures reshape perception, affect, and embodiment.

The drawing originates from a Renaissance emblem book – reference collections of motifs compiled for reproduction and reuse, produced at the moment when print first enabled the mass circulation of images. By reactivating this symbol, Delarue points to an unexpected genealogy of contemporary image production, connecting sixteenth-century motifs with memes: brief, mobile forms whose power lies less in meaning than in their capacity to circulate, transform, and be endlessly appropriated.

Long associated with the divine, with representation of power, or with the promise of revelation or exctasy, the sun here is detached from any religious, political, or cosmological referent. Saturated by centuries of use across divergent contexts, it becomes paradoxically emptied of stable meaning. Through repetition and overexposure, the symbol is worn down and rendered available again as a form that persists not because of what it signifies, but because of its capacity to reappear. 

This condition resonates with the sun’s material reality: a form that appears continuous and stable, yet never identical to itself. It exists only through an incessant flux of photons, each singular and without duration, producing the illusion of permanence through constant recomposition. Delarue draws on this tension between apparent continuity and underlying instability to reflect on contemporary image regimes, in which forms survive as repetitions without origin – generated, recombined, and transformed through processes that are neither living nor fully autonomous.

When illuminated, TAFAA – SIGNAL (SPIN AN EMPTY VESSEL, THIS IS FINE) reactivates the affective charge of an archetype while exposing how contemporary visual culture – accelerated, saturated, and largely memoryless – continues to rely on ancient matrices. The use of neon intensifies this logic: light carries no meaning in itself, it produces presence without narration. Appearing continuous, neon is in fact the result of an unstable discharge that endlessly recomposes itself. It does not illustrate; it emits. In this shift from symbol to signal, the sun no longer asserts authority or belief. It becomes an open structure of appearance – an empty vessel – through which the ongoing circulation, depletion, and rebirth of forms in the digital present are made visible.