Some content cannot be designed for engagement, because engagement is the wrong measure. There Was A War is built from 131 individual eyewitness accounts of Syria's civil war, collected between 2011 and 2016 by Human Rights Watch and Save the Children — interviews with protesters detained and tortured, defectors from the Syrian military, and children and parents who fled their homes. The only honest design goal for material like this is that it cannot be looked away from casually. Testimony refuses every metric — there is no dashboard for being heard.
For her 2019 retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao — forty years of work, with three new commissions — Jenny Holzer conceived There Was A War as a four-sided vertical LED sign that moves: descending from a cavity in the gallery ceiling, traveling the room on a robotic assembly, spinning on its vertical axis while the testimony scrolls across its faces. The words approach the visitor; the visitor does not get to choose their distance.
Hypersonic, the kinetic-sculpture studio behind the work's robotic systems, led the build with Jenny Holzer Studio — four independent winch motor axes carrying the sign through the space, synchronized with the rotation and the text. Sitara served as Hypersonic's technical production partner, supporting the systems that let a moving, speaking machine perform in a museum gallery, every open hour, for the run of the exhibition.
That reliability requirement is the unglamorous center of the work. An artwork carrying testimony cannot stutter, drift, or fail halfway through a sentence — the system has to be invisible so the words can be everything. Building real-time physical systems to that standard, in service of someone else's voice, is the center of our practice.
There Was A War is also what our partnerships look like at their best: a peer studio leading in its discipline, Sitara underneath the surface making the system dependable, and an artist's intent carried intact from studio to gallery floor.