The Long Take renders one room’s last twenty-four hours as a single continuous translucent membrane along a horizontal time axis. The worm’s circumferential surface is smooth where the room was empty, asymmetrically bulged where someone was moving, and quietly breathing-thick where someone was simply present. As the cursor sweeps from left to right, the surface grows into the future — the worm is being drawn, in real time, by the day that has just happened.
The data is not abstract. It comes from a single mmWave radar mounted in each room, reporting the position and Doppler speed of up to three human bodies at eight readings a second. Where a body sat at a desk, the worm narrows into a long quiet thread. Where it walked across the floor, the worm widens and contorts. Where two bodies passed each other, the surface erupts in lobes.
A pentatonic synth marks each thirty-second bin of activity as the cursor crosses it. The pitch is the speed of movement; the volume, the density of presence. Quiet sections are silent. Active sections sound like wind chimes after rain.
Each of the four rooms with radar — office, library, living room, kitchen — has its own version. The same renderer, parameterised. The result is four worms, four melodies, four versions of the same day.
The kitchen tube is busier than the others, and the small blips that appear all through the day are mostly not people. They are the dogs, going in and out of the garden through the back door. The radar does not know this. It is correct to count them.