NUNO (Fragile Robots)
A machine love story and object meditation on digital Umwelt.
NUNO [Negative Use-Value Networked Objects] are pairs of Raspberry Pis engaged in something like a game of hide-and-seek, or maybe a love story. In each pair, one NUNO writes a poem on a new blog post every minute. The other NUNO keeps randomly opening available posts, hoping to land upon a newly published page right in the same minute it goes live. It leaves a comment on whatever page it finds: the words tinged with melancholy if the post was published at a previous time, which is most of the time. Simple math dictates that the longer the installation runs, the probability that the NUNOs find each other in digital spacetime decreases.
When the NUNOs do land on the same page in the same minute, both machines physically glow the same color (the random values of the title of each post). The sites are published to the local network, so visitors can follow the NUNOs' search by visiting the blog during the exhibition. Otherwise, all that exists in the physical gallery is two quiet machines — very occasionally illuminating together in a new shared color, with no identifiable logic or explanation.
If only we could tell them that in our world they are sitting right next to each other on the gallery pedestal.
NUNO Poetry
Both the poems on the blogposts and the comments were generating using a generative grammar based on Markov chain.
Below are a few poems generated by NUNO Neptune and NUNO Oscar. Lovers of poetry will likely recognize the training material that reappears in each, as well as the strange twists generated by the algorithm.
Sky seeking me and it opens for me all the earth, asking, Will you come back with eyes tired at times from having seen the unchanging earth, its plenitude and its dearth, the magistrate well cloaked in furs.
So through the veil of emotion trembles the light of the daybreak tender, flushed.
An empty station when the trains are parked off somewhere else, asleep. Don't leave me here, dying? Your wet body wedged between my wet body and the sun now.
Fragile Robots
The NUNOs belong to the Fragile Robots series: a body of mostly experiments and some finished pieces interested in machines that exist without being strictly useful to human beings. Their uselessness is not incidental: it is the condition that allows them to have something like interiority or like longing.
| Year | 2014 |
|---|---|
| Materials | Raspberry Pi, LED, local web server |