Those Men In Fruit / A SILENT Tremble (2009)

Those Men In Fruit / A SILENT Tremble is a two-act durational performance and video work created by Iain Ball during his undergraduate studies at Oxford Brookes University. Five men were recruited via Gumtree, dressed in business suits, and paid to sit in total silence for two hours in a rented conference room. Each wore 3D cinema glasses while the BBC documentary series Planet Earth played on a projector — on mute. Water, tea, and coffee were provided. There were no further instructions, no interaction, and no stated purpose beyond the transaction of being paid to sit there.

Act 2 reconfigured the documentation from the first act: the HD video was shown on a television alongside aloe vera plants and Marks & Spencer lime-flavoured drinks, with the album Common Existence by Thursday playing. Two of the original participants returned, again wearing 3D glasses. They performed a ritualistic destruction of an aloe vera plant, wore head torches, and served drinks to an audience, revisiting the silence and payment structure of the first act within a new context.

Video documentation of both acts has been archived on-chain as part of the Iconoplasm X Live Trap NFT contract.