<Stay-tion> is an interactive installation that subverts the railway time-distance diagram — the chart that once recorded when and where trains stopped — transforming the halting imposed by the system into a dwelling chosen by the individual.

A railway diagram plots time along the horizontal axis and space along the vertical, rendering a train's entire day as a single line. The slope of the line is speed, and where the line runs flat, the train has come to a stop. On this chart, when and where a train halts has already been determined. Passengers may choose a destination, but they hold no authority over the time or place of their dwelling. Within this system, designed upon the absolute values of efficiency and punctuality, the individual's own rhythm is gradually erased.

The work attempts a Route Personalization that transfers the subject of this chart from the train to the person. When visitors connect through their smartphones, each is assigned a unique train number, and the accelerometer embedded in the device measures their movement in real time. The collected data is instantly translated into the slope of a line drawn across a large screen. Move quickly and the line descends steeply; come to a stop and it runs flat. The lines of everyone connected at once overlap and intersect on the screen, completing in real time a route map that no timetable could have anticipated.

As artificial intelligence and automation advance, personalization emerges as an increasingly critical question. Yet personalization here does not refer to algorithmic recommendation, but to the singular narrative a person accumulates through living. Stories that could only have occurred at a particular time in a particular place — the totality of one person's sensations and choices — remain a territory no artificial intelligence can fully reach. The work proposes a space where that narrative is recorded as a single line, illuminating a future railway as a route made by people rather than one designed by systems.

The movement of everyone who passes through this space over the course of a day is recorded without exception and reconstructed into a single diagram for that day. Belonging to no particular individual, this chart is a collective route map made together by the dwelling and movement of all who passed through on that day, accumulating day by day throughout the exhibition as a second outcome the work leaves behind.